Author George Saunders

A few weeks back, the author George Saunders, who is blond, with the shaggy beard of someone who has better things to think about than his appearance, was sitting in a Murray Hill hotel with The Observer, playing Jishaku, a Japanese strategy game involving magnets. Several rounds in, he abruptly announced that he would have to stop playing. He was “too competitive,” he said, and couldn’t “concentrate on winning and talking” at the same time.

Putting down his magnets, he launched into an explanation of his parodic use of idiomatic language in his fiction.

The concept had gestated during his years as a geophysical engineer and technical writer for Radian International, an environmental engineering company. There was a lot of on-the-job jargon.

“I got the idea that technical language isn’t necessarily nonpoetic language,” said Mr. Saunders, 54, whose sixth book, the story collection Tenth of December, came out last week from Random House. Eventually, he left Radian to pursue an M.A. in creative writing at Syracuse University. “I’d understand it,” he said of his Radian-speak (though he could have also been telling of his fiction), “but to the outside world it would sound like this nonsense language.”

Nearly every piece of fiction Mr. Saunders has written—in his collections CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, Pastoralia, In Persuasion Nation and the novella The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil—exists in its own self-contained world. The elements of his dystopic landscapes have aged well. The Verisimilitude Inspector, from CivilWarLand still feels wonderfully original. And the Chill ’n’ Pray cooler—it projects a hologram of saints as it cools your beverage—from the story “The 400-pound CEO” will doubtless endure.

These images tell us about as much about Mr. Saunders’s characters as the characters themselves. With their ICANSPEAK!™ baby masks and carnival-barker lingo, his antiheroes describe their lives in a self-reflexive doublespeak, which turns reading into a game of context-Clue. Then there’s Mr. Saunders’s fondness for manipulating syntax, in which he plays quite dirty indeed. The longest story in the new collection, “The Semplica Girl Diaries,” is narrated through journal entries by a hapless family man, which contain virtually no articles. The style is based on extreme shorthand from Mr. Saunders’s own former journals. Hard to read? Yes, but it’s even more difficult to write.

“You’re taking kind of a gamble with that tactic,” Mr. Saunders said. “If you get it, it brings us that much closer as reader and writer. We are kind of in a simulation of a relationship, and I’m trying to be respectful and intimate. So the more I suggest intuitively, the more you’re going to bond with me, if I do it correctly. I use a lot of omission, a lot of implication.”

That relationship with the reader is paramount. “I don’t care about the thematics, or the characters, the syntax, or the intellectual content. But I have a sense when writing of a reader that is out there, and I really want them to get me. I want them to feel respected. Those other parts are all secondary characteristics to the larger end: to try to get the reader to take notice and feel respected by the writer in some deep way. To feel that we are in a relationship.”

And so Mr. Saunders works slowly. By his count, he writes two stories a year.

Talking about his path from geophysical engineer to MacArthur Fellow, he came across as lucky. Not everyone has had the benefit of growing up in a Chicago suburb as a Reagan-supporting, Ayn Rand-reading Objectivist, or of experiencing a revelation while working in a Sumatra oil field, as he did on an exploration with a geophysics crew.

Most protagonists in a Saunders story are what Regina Marler once described in this paper as “a sad sack with a humiliating job (often involving a costume), a hot-to-trot wife, a sick child and the threat of a pink slip looming.” In Murray Hill, Mr. Saunders described those characters as stand-ins for himself “on a slightly worse day.”

Tenth of December can feel at times like a collection of slightly different drafts of earlier work. In the new story “Escape From Spiderhead,” the protagonist, Jeff, is a teenager kept in a corporate lab/facility where he is perpetually stoned on drips of synthetic drugs like BlissTime™ and Verbalace. If that sounds familiar, it’s because the titular character in “Jon” from the earlier collection In Persuasion Nation (he also appears in The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil) is a teenager kept in a corporate lab/facility where he is perpetually stoned on a drip of synthetic drugs like Aurabon©.

In contrast, Mr. Saunders’s journalistic work is wide-ranging and invariably out of left field. His essay collection, The Braindead Megaphone, published in 2007, has subjects ranging from Esther Forbes to Huck Finn. Since that book, though, he has more or less given up journalism, which is probably for the best. He doesn’t like the part where you get in trouble or people yell at you. It makes him feel like a bad person.

In a piece included in The Braindead Megaphone, Mr. Saunders writes about a religious leader who had once been a pimp. He had stabbed a man’s eye out, but turned his life around. He was a good guy with a nice wife, kids and a respectable home, and also, now, Jesus. Mr. Saunders thought: what a great story. But when he called the pastor to fact-check, the reformed criminal begged him not to include any gory details.

“He knew he had been on record, but said that he had forgotten, that he had gotten carried away,” Mr. Saunders said. “He was like, ‘You can’t print this, my family will read this, it will ruin my life.’” So Mr. Saunders cut out that part of the history. “I know that I could have included it ... that ethically, I should have. But I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. I would have regretted it.”

“I think I can tell my truth much better in fiction,” he added. “There aren’t those moral or ethical issues.”
Morality is a tricky subject in his stories. The defining trait of his protagonists is a total lack of self-awareness. They stumble onto the profound as if it were a banana peel. He pointed to the Chekhov quote, “Art doesn’t solve problems, it only formulates them correctly.”

The notion that art should be truthful rather than corrective became particularly important when, in the late ’90s, Ben Stiller’s film production company bought the rights to CivilWarLand. Mr. Saunders wrote a script—but it never saw light of day. In a recent New Yorker article about Mr. Stiller, Mr. Saunders said, “I would have absolutely sold out to get the movie made—added a car chase, a puppy cluster, whatever—and Ben always insisted on returning to the darkest, oldest version of the story.”

In Murray Hill, he said he had been “being facetious. I would have changed the story, but only to do service to the film’s reality.”

For Mr. Stiller, Mr. Saunders only had the highest praise. “Ben taught me that movies are not about purple or beautiful language,” he said. “It’s about structures.”

Speaking of which, he would like to try his hand at a novel. But the “trying” part is complicated. “I found from bitter experiences that if I decide to do something and do it, the thing doesn’t agree to be done. But if I wait, if I’m patient ...”

Tao Lin (Wikipedia)

If you were wondering what kind of people fork over money for a class taught by the guy who live-blogged Hurricane Sandy for Thought Catalog while on Ecstasy, well, they’re pretty much what you’d expect.

“Suck it, Paul Dano!” crowed one young Williamsburg resident, referring to a play in which the actor had recently appeared. “I say ‘James Franco’ whenever something bad happens,” said another.

Finally, Mr. Lin arrived in his signature hoodie and plaid shirt. He kept his eyes cast to the floor and mumbled questions so softly that his students looked at each other, confused, until someone had the courage to ask him to repeat himself.

The topic of the night was George Saunders’s short story, “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline.”

“I’m surprised that so many of you got the thing with the ghosts,” Mr. Lin said. “I didn’t get that part at all. I also felt like the language was too idiomatic.”

Later in the two-hour session, the author of Shoplifting From American Apparel explained that Mr. Saunders operated with the premise that art has a moral function, and questioned the effectiveness of stories written by a man who once claimed in an interview to “know nothing.”

“Saunders reinforces what I already feel. Curtis Sittenfeld [whose work was also read in the class] forces you to relate to someone else’s point of view,” Mr. Lin said. Additional words of wisdom included “selling out is very moral,” and “I think you are making the world a worse place,” in reference to something the Transom said about art, reality or some such.

Nevertheless, the dozen and a half students attending the class—who ranged in age from slightly younger than Mr. Lin’s own 29 years to a woman who talked about working at a bank “before you were born”—seemed satisfied. Later, on the train, Mr. Lin told the Transom that we should have come a week earlier, when he had taken “a lot more drugs” before his lecture. Then he tried to sell us some sunglasses he said he had stolen from LensCrafters before kneeling on the floor and scooping up the dust of an Adderall tablet, which he had accidentally stomped with his boot.

The stories will be accompanied by brief testimonials from the authors about their experience reading at KGB, according to Mr. Steinberg.

The Greatest Stories Ever Read—edited by Suzanne Dottino, the organizer of the KGB Bar's Sunday Night Fiction Series—will be KGB's fifth anthology to date. (The last one, On the Rocks, came out in 2002.)

The anthology is the second book Mr. Steinberg will have shopped to publishers since he split from the Regal Literary agency this fall and started his own eponymous shop. The first was novelist Keith Donohue's Angels of Destruction, which Mr. Steinberg sold to Crown as part of a two-book deal worth about $1.3 million dollars.

Here's the full list of stories currently slated to be included in the new anthology:

Jonathan Lethem - Men and Cartoons

Norman Rush - Whites

Daniel Alarcon - Republica and Grau

Sam Lipyste - HomeLand

Alicia Erian - The Prison Wife

John Haskell - I Am Not Jackson Pollack

Tom Bissell - God Lives in St. Petersburg

George Saunders - CommComm

Amanda Fillipacchi - Love Creeps

Suki Kim - The Interpreter

Paul LaFarge - Phlogistan

Jonathan Ames - The Extra Man

There are a few such stories in Mr. Saunders’ third and darkest collection, In Persuasion Nation—a smorgasbord of satires, from the mild to the dementedly brilliant. One of them, “Brad Carrigan, American,” follows the misadventures of a pretend family on a floundering “reality” show. Brad knows that his distaste for the poop jokes and violent plot turns foisted on them by the all-powerful producers are losing him points with his pretend wife, and that he’ll be written off the show if he doesn’t “accentuate the positive.” He tries to suppress his compassion for the still-living corpses—victims of a far-away ethnic cleansing—that have somehow appeared at their home as backyard décor, and muster some enthusiasm for the new trend of FunGeese—malleable garden sculptures created by spraying live Canadian geese with a styrene coating which kills them yet leaves them flexible enough to arrange into wacky poses. “Interesting is good, Brad,” his ratings-conscious wife reminds him. “Surprising is good.”

One evening, the Carrigan family gathers in front of the television to enjoy a show-within-a-show called FinalTwist. On FinalTwist, five college friends take a sixth out for dinner, ostensibly to introduce him to a girl, but “actually to break the news that his mother is dead. This is the InitialTwist. During dessert they are told that, in fact, all of their mothers are dead. This is the SecondTwist. The ThirdTwist is, not only are all their mothers dead, the show paid to have them killed, and the fourth and FinalTwist is, the kids have just eaten their own grilled mothers.”

Like the loving God who appeared at the end of Mr. Saunders’ novella The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil (2005), Mr. Saunders lets his fantasy worlds go entirely to hell before he reaches in to tweak the ending. When Brad’s character is cancelled and his personality dissolved, Brad hopes he’ll at least reincarnate as someone who acts on his compassion sooner, who doesn’t waste his life “on accumulation, trivia, self-protection, and vanity.” You can feel the weight of the author’s approval behind this belated epiphany. (Don’t worry about Brad—if he doesn’t get the message now, there may be other chances: The dead in these stories tend to stick around.)

Although human frailty gets its share of wallops, Mr. Saunders’ most frequent target in this collection is consumer culture, as in the savage title story, a fable of competing brands in which hapless actors and anthropomorphized junk-food products cycle through repeating vignettes of cruelty to attract sales. You may never look fondly on a Dorito again.

The eponymous hero of “Jon” is a young man raised from infancy as part of a sheltered elite of product testers (the teenagers are celebrities in the world outside their glass-walled enclosure). His brain implant continually supplies advertisements (“location indicators” or “LIs”) to fill the place of actual memories and in answer to the slightest emotion. When his new wife suggests they ditch their implants and make a life with their baby outside the program, Jon is terrified, imagining the paucity of his own thoughts. How can they communicate without their shared software? “If I wish to compare my love to a love I have previous knowledge of,” he thinks, “I do not want to stand there in the wind casting about for my metaphor! If I want to say, like, Carolyn, remember that RE/MAX one where as the redhead kid falls asleep holding that Teddy bear rescued from the trash, the bear comes alive and winks, and the announcer goes, Home is the place where you find yourself suddenly no longer longing for home (LI 34451)—if I want to say to Carolyn, Carolyn, LI 34451, check it out, that is how I feel about you—well, then, I want to say it!”

Mr. Saunders is often compared to Kurt Vonnegut for his playfulness, his genius for the vernacular, and his pained recognition that it’s not only under totalitarian regimes that you’ll find cultural lock step: People love to conform, even if they have to chew off their own nonconforming bits. What sets Mr. Saunders apart is that his ideal of goodness—protection of the weak, bravery, open dissent—has a pop-spiritual basis. In “CommComm,” perhaps the strongest story in the collection, a beleaguered office worker fails to tell his spectral parents that they’ve been murdered. He can’t bear to let them go. A happy ending becomes possible only when he breaks the news to them, moments before he himself is murdered. “Feels super,” says his weary mother, finally tuning in to the celestial choir. “‘Like you had a terrible crick and then it went away,’ Dad says. They smile, step through the wall, vanish in two little sudden blurps of light.”

Despite the consolations of the afterlife, In Persuasion Nation has sharper edges than Mr. Saunders’ first two collections. It’s tempting to read it as a war protest, and to picture the author grinding his teeth over the compliant, brand-loyal American masses, not so much blind to suffering as eager to follow the leader and accentuate the positive.

Regina Marler is the editor of Queer Beats: How the Beats Turned America On to Sex (Cleis Press) and a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Times Book Review and The Advocate.