TheBrain-Dead Megaphone

George Saunders is the internationally bestselling author of Lincoln in the Bardo and the Folio Prize-winning, New York Times bestselling short story collection Tenth of December, among other books.Incisively analyzing American culture and politics, these essays are incredibly topical and resonant. Saunders is as much admired for his essays as his fiction; his recent New Yorker article about Donald Trump supporters had 896,000 views from 691,000 visitors in the first seven days, and had 50,000 social shares in that time.His fans include Jonathan Franzen, Zadie Smith, Margaret Atwood, Thomas Pynchon, Jennifer Egan, Lorrie Moore, Hari Kunzru and Tobias Wolff.George Saunders was listed as one of TIME's 100 Most Influential People in the World, 2013.This collection is rejacketed in a new style alongside the paperback of Lincoln in the Bardo and the rest of his backlist.George Saunders is the author of nine books, including Lincoln in the Bardo, winner of the 2017 Man Booker Prize. Tenth of December was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the inaugural Folio Prize. He has received MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships and the PEN/Malamud Prize for excellence in the short story, and was recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2013, he was named one of the world's 100 most influential people by Time magazine. He teaches in the creative writing program at Syracuse University. georgesaundersbooks.comIn this, his first collection of essays, Saunders trains his eye on the real world rather than the fictional and reveals it to be brimming with wonderful, marvellous strangeness. As he faces a political and cultural reality saturated with lazy media, false promises and political doublespeak, Saunders invokes the wisdom of American literary heroes Twain, Vonnegut and Barthelme and inspires us to re-examine our assumptions about the world we live in, as we struggle to discover what is really there.A hilarious and incisive collection of essays from George Saunders, the No. 1 New York Times bestselling author of the 2017 Man Booker Prize winner Lincoln in the Bardo'Deceptively light ... deadpan funny ... Saunders, as an American social and literary critic, may be shaping up as the Orwell of the millennium''Not since Twain has America produced a satirist this funny''Saunders is a warm and funny guide through familiar and foreign landscapes ... His job is to observe and be funny ... in a tone often reminiscent of Bill Bryson''Again and again, Saunders demonstrates that wacky, subversive, formally strange writing is not only contrary to our nation's capitalist spirit, it's the most natural and effective of responses to it. He makes the all-but-impossible look effortless. We're lucky to have him'In the same vein as his much-loved weekly column for the Guardian Magazine, this is a hilarious and incisive collection of essays from George Saunders.