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“... George Saunders – whose semi-official website carries a reminder that the man who played Addison DeWitt in All about Eve was called George SANDERS – was born in Chicago in 1958. A schoolteacher got him interested in literature, but having been exposed at an impressionable age to the novels of Ayn Rand he ended up studying geophysical engineering: ‘I didn’t want to be one of those life-sucking parasitic artists,’ he recalled last year ...”

“... Halfway​ through my first reading of ‘Liberation Day’, the 63-page title novella of George Saunders’s new collection, a man appears to me. He is not George Saunders exactly – an old version maybe, or a could-have-been. He is speaking the story, or writing it, or daydreaming it at a desk in an empty classroom ...”

“... So goes ‘The Semplica Girl Diaries’, the longest and most engrossing of the stories in George Saunders’s fourth collection, Tenth of December. Eight of the book’s ten stories revolve around rescue scenarios. (The two brief pieces that don’t – ‘Sticks’, from 1995, a two-page sketch about a man who obsessively decorates a pole in his ...”

“... George Saunders​ has long had a thing for ghosts, especially ghosts who haven’t figured out that they’re dead. The title story of his first collection, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (1996), concerned a down-on-its-luck theme park with a Blacksmith Shoppe, a ninety-foot section of the Erie Canal, and a holographic projection of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States ...”

“... Donne, Nabokov and Spark, the mechanisms of wit are unseen and so inimitable. Of living writers, George Saunders is the one whose stories most evoke Saki’s clear-eyed surrealism. Both thrive on the question of class; where Saki has landowners eaten by wolves, Saunders imagines third-world women displayed as human ...”

“... about how sea cucumbers eject their internal organs when under threat, about how Gary Oldman and George Saunders share the same face – and reposted them to enormous success. My replicant had more than six thousand followers after only four months. If fake me continued at this rate then he would quickly become more popular than real me, and – since ...”

“... web. But it is difficult enough to pass through the murky reason of alienated language in fiction (George Saunders and a few others notwithstanding); it is far harder to do so in criticism. Steyerl views almost everything symptomatically, which permits us to attempt the same with her work. Ultimately, her thinking is less dialectical than ...”

“... who shunned the physical world in favour of the knottier, more intractable challenges of the mind; George Saunders offers comic heroes who fail excellently. Turn the book over, lift up the flap. We don’t look too bad in black and white, do we, our hair artfully mussed, our beards half-grown, our eyeglasses polished. But can’t you see the fear in our ...”

“... Since 1956 it has been official policy in the USSR to criticise the abuses of power by Joseph Stalin in the period of the so-called Cult of the Individual. It is a widely-held misconception in the West that such criticism ended in the Brezhnev years. In fact, party textbooks continued to castigate Stalin. The negative comments became less specific, however, and many people who weren’t old enough to learn about the purges from Khrushchev’s revelations in the late Fifties and early Sixties were unaware of the scale of the human carnage that Stalin had perpetrated in the Soviet Union ...”

“... on his experience in Alcoholics Anonymous, was outed as a reader of self-help after his death. George Saunders has called fiction ‘a kind of compassion-generating machine that saves us from sloth’. Both writers delivered college commencement addresses that were then marketed as inspirational pamphlets. Lately the writers Sabina Murray and Ocean ...”

“... Flying to America on her bedside table; Jenny Offill returns regularly to ‘Not-Knowing’; and George Saunders has filled the slot for a satirical ‘vaudevillian’ at the New Yorker. In different ways, they are all figuring out what it means to come after ...”

“... with a group of US fiction writers around his age that includes the late David Foster Wallace, George Saunders, Jonathan Franzen and Jeffrey Eugenides. There are a few things that set Antrim apart: he’s Southern; his strongest affinity to a writer in the previous generation is to Donald Barthelme, not Don DeLillo; he’s the least likely to be ...”

“... assassinations and mass killings. Yet it still gives me an eerie feeling to read about people like George Orwell, Stephen Spender and Raymond Aron, to say nothing of less admirable characters of the Melvin Lasky stripe, taking part in surreptitiously subsidised anti-Communist ventures – magazines, symphony orchestras, art exhibitions – or in the setting up ...”

“... In 1971 Arthur Mizener’s The Saddest Story seemed adequately exhaustive, but now Max Saunders comes along with two vast volumes, even more thorough and more than doubling the page count. Alan Judd, faithful to Ford’s own lack of respect for academic pieties, brought out his footnoteless but still valuable life of Ford in 1990. ...”

“... social justice, non-violence and peace, often putting their bodies on the line’. In his preface George Saunders, though he stays in his corner by focusing mostly on the fiction, suggests that reading Paley will spark ‘a revived concern for other people’s suffering’ and ends by recommending her work to anyone ‘looking for a more full-hearted way ...”