Table of Contents

.- 1 "A Job to Do": George Saunders on, and at, Work.- 2 Horning In: Language, Subordination and Freedom in the Short Fiction of George Saunders.- 3 Language Between Lyricism and Corporatism: George Saunders’s New Sincerity.- 4 “Hope that, in future, all is well”: American Exceptionalism and Hopes for Resistance in Two Stories by George Saunders.- 5 Hanging by a Thread in the Homeland: The Four Institutional Monologues of George Saunders.- 6 Biopolitical Dystopias, Bureaucratic Carnivores, Synthetic Primitives: “Pastoralia” as Human Zoo.- 7 Ghosts and Theme Parks: The Supernatural and the Artificial in George Saunders’s Short Stories.- 8 The Absent Presence of the Deus Absconditus in the Work of George Saunders.- 9 Narrative Empathy in George Saunders’s Short Fiction.- 10 Cruel Inventions: George Saunders’s Literary Darkenfloxx™.- 11 Dreaming and Realizing “The Semplica Girl Diaries”: A Post-Jungian Reading.- 12  Everyday Zombies: Ethics and the Contemporary in George Saunders’s “Sea Oak” and “Brad Carrigan, American”.- 13 “Third Person Ventriloquism”: Microdialogues and Polyphony in George Saunders’s “Victory Lap”.- 14 “A little at a time. And Iteratively”: A Conversation with George Saunders.

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"An indispensable guide to one of the freshest and most innovative writers of the 21st century. The wide-ranging contributions from a team of international scholars capture the energy of George Saunders's genre-busting prose, both introducing new readers to the work and offering new insights to enthusiasts. A landmark in short fiction studies." (Ailsa Cox, Professor of Short Fiction, Edge Hill University, author of "Writing Short Stories" (2nd edition, 2016)) "Read in sequence, these essays build their own story, from the meanings of "work" in George Saunders's art to the representations of a supersaturated consciousness in his polyphonic monologues. It's about the moral imperatives behind the mind-tingling brilliance, the funny-sad humor and soulful grotesqueries, of a major American satirist, but it's also about the practice of imaginative scholarship, and, not accidentally, about the inexhaustible wonders of the short story form." (Susan Lohafer, Professor Emerita, University of Iowa, author of "Reading for Storyness" (2003))

About the Author

Philip Coleman is Associate Professor and Fellow at the School of English, Trinity College Dublin. His most recent books are John Berryman’s Public Vision: re-locating ‘the scene of disorder’ (2014), Berryman’s Fate: A Centenary Celebration in Verse (2014), and Critical Insights: David Foster Wallace (2015). He is currently co-editing a volume of John Berryman’s letters.
Steve Gronert Ellerhoff completed a PhD in the School of English, Trinity College Dublin, in 2014. His thesis was published as Post-Jungian Psychology and the Short Stories of Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut: Golden Apples of the Monkey House (2016). He is also the author of a novel, Time’s Laughingstocks (2013), a collection of short stories, Tales From the Internet (2015), and other fiction appearing online and in print.