In the process, Saunders won a reputation not just as a vicious, dead-on satirist of loners and losers but also as a champion for the disenfranchised and deprived. Since then has emerged In Persuasion Nation, his third collection a children’s book that is and isn’t for kids called The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip a self-standing novella called The Brief, Frightening Reign of Phil and an essay collection, The Braindead Megaphone, with more acute comments about the United States in the twenty-ﬁrst century than ten years’ worth of MSNBC. Saunders followed this up with Pastoralia, whose title novella concerned a favorite subject of his: When Historical Reenactment Te n t h o f D e c e m b e r, by George Saunders (Random House, 272 pp., $26 cloth 288 pp., $15 paper) 1 4 2 G A L E F Y Goes Bad. The scenarios of the near future were as unsettling as they were plausible.

The voice was that of a hapless underling, self-aware but half-accepting of a world that featured a Center for Wayward Nuns, a psychiatric team called GuiltMasters, and a Corporate Porcine Receptacle that any sane individual would call a pig trough. It featured disgruntled employees and company heavies, polluted landscapes and outcasts of every stripe, including mutants. Just as Auden stamped the mid-twentieth century the Age of Anxiety, Saunders observed the stunted, theme-park mentality of our society and wrote his ﬁrst book, an oddball collection with the oddball title CivilWarLand in Bad Decline.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:ġ 4 1 R F I C T I O N I N R E V I E W D A V I D G A L E F In an age when American democracy is consumed by American capitalism, the clichés of corporation-speak are taking over our lexicon, and irony is the dominant mode of our existence, George Saunders seems inevitable.

Civilwarland in bad decline sparknotes