Tag: George Saunders

“These initial stories often take place in theme parks gone to seed or soul-withering exurban office strips, but the stories themselves are overflowing with vitality; they are sometimes very dark but they are also very, very funny. The characters speak in a strange new language — a kind of heightened bureaucratese, or a passively received vernacular that is built around self-improvement clichés (‘It made me livid and twice that night I had to step into a closet and perform my Hatred Abatement Breathing’) — and this lends them the feeling of allegory, though they are something else too, that’s harder to place.”