Makeup’s done a super job of making him look decayed. Little Scotty Tiney’s lying motionless on a wooden cart near the goat-udder bagpipist. Later that night in the Castle 4 courtyard Bill Tiney’s screaming at a group of Clients for letting his son die of cholera. It’s a kind of working-class surrealism, as in this passage from a story called “Bounty”: He told the New Yorker: “I found that if I dropped in some weird element-a theme park or some ghosts or whatever-it had the effect of bumping things up into a higher register, where I wasn’t quite sure what the piece was anymore, or how it was supposed to behave, which was good.” Saunders’s protagonists don’t punch the clock in factories or sawmills rather, they make their living playing Neanderthals in artificial living-history exhibits, exterminating exotic vermin, running virtual-reality emporiums, or as male strippers in pilot-themed restaurants. Eventually, he chucked the well-worn tropes of minimalist fiction. His signature style-a trippy, postapocalyptic absurdism-grew out of frustration with more conventional idioms he began by channeling Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Carver, but the results were flat. Saunders graduated from the Colorado School of Mines with a degree in geophysics. Previous books-especially CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, published in 1996, and Pastoralia, published in 2000-have been fawned over by everyone from Garrison Keillor to Thomas Pynchon. Though this level of commercial success is recent, Saunders is no underground talent he won a MacArthur genius grant in 2006, he publishes regularly in the New Yorker, and he has won four National Magazine Awards for fiction.

On the cover of the New York Times Magazine, Joel Lovell declared it “The Best Book You’ll Read This Year” by mid-month Tenth of December was on the New York Times bestseller list (at number three!). Tenth of December, the sixth book and fourth collection of short stories by George Saunders, was published in early January.

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