Liberation Day: Stories
George Saunders
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Liberation Day: Stories
George Saunders
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Saunders’s career-long strategies have acquired a deeper intensity, focus and bite. He’s always been a moralist, concerned with our obligations to one another; now, an ongoing and intense debate over democracy and its threats has further exposed that.
Acutely relevant.
... it seems that nearly a decade later, Saunders is no longer so sure about the possibility of transformative heroism or resistance, or what that might even mean. The prevailing mood throughout is much more muted and uncertain, with a concomitant diminution in linguistic vivacity. The language the characters speak and think in is flatter, deader, at once more anodyne and anguished.
... brazenly piles on [Saunders'] trademark techniques: fantastical carnivals, snappy marketing slogans, heart-weary characters, and an unerring ear for prose rhythms.
There may be no more moral writer working right now than George Saunders – and no writer who makes you want to try harder to be a better human.
[Saunders] he wields the 'moral-ethical tool' of fiction with more directness and efficiency than ever before.
... the settings on the supercollider feel just off this time. The standard of Saunders’ writing remains astronomically high, but there are slippages suddenly.
Writers to admire queue up on the back cover of George Saunders’s new book in an earnest arms race of praise.
If you’re new to George Saunders, then in Liberation Day: Stories, his first collection of stories since 2013, a weird world of eccentricity and meticulous chaos awaits.
George Saunders is back with a new collection of short stories that feature his usual dystopian worlds and heartland characters whose lives and language have been fractured by social and economic pressures they barely understand.
Both tragic and lighthearted.
Saunders designs plots that force his characters to choose between their own well-being, dignity, and autonomy and those of another person.
... a spiritual successor to Saunders’s last collection...At first, it doesn’t seem to progress much beyond those stories. Being something of a desk guy, Saunders works from templates...It’s been a while since we had a writer so widely revered who has such a limited range, though it sometimes jumps high above itself.
It will surprise few readers of contemporary fiction to learn that George Saunders’ new collection of short stories, Liberation Day, is very good indeed.
To say too much about the trajectory of the story ['Liberation Day'] would spoil Saunders’ originality, his artful world-building and linguistic flourishes, but rest assured that he creates a grotesquely believable future.
Classic Saunders: the comedy wrung out of clunky jargon and wonky syntax, the blend of high and low registers, the revelation of a peculiar world by means of a peculiar voice.
These nine stories are startling. They are dark, spiky, sad and imbued at times with a dark humour. They explore class, power and morality in near-future dystopias (and to be frank, some of them are current dystopias). As a reader you are never comfortable, but you are kind of complicit.
Saunders sticks to his guns as he matches practice to theory. Or at least he does up to a point – because, especially in the stories set in his contemporary America, he can’t always hide his sympathy for people at the bottom of the social heap, or his distaste for those who feel themselves entitled.
I prefer Saunders’s own modest account of his career: 'The focus of my artistic life has been trying to learn to write emotionally moving stories that a reader feels compelled to finish'.
Inimitable.
Reading these tales is like unwrapping a package, removing one layer only to find another underneath, accumulating clues about the rules of the story’s twisted culture.
Such stories, with their invented language and formal experimentation, break with the Turgenev/Tolstoy realist tradition completely, but just like theirs, Saunders’s work repays multiple rereadings..
There is a similar nastiness to them. The arc never ends in a catch, but a kick in the particulars. Saunders is not a realist, even when he is writing about reality. The title story exemplifies his amplified reality. It challenges the reader to decode what is going on.
... peak Saunders, which is to say that his asymptotic trajectory towards complete George Saundersness continues. Readers who love what he does with the short story will love this. Readers less enchanted with his tics and tropes may not be won over.
... inventive, provocative, difficult, interesting, and annoying. Saunders does not make it easy for his reader to grasp the nub of his stories due to misdirection and inadequate language.
Boldly imagined tales are catalyzed by outright and insidious assaults on our most basic rights, including freedom of mind.
What can't George Saunders do?.
A wide-ranging collection that alternates his familiar fun house of warped simulations with subtler dramas.