Liberation Day

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE • “One of our most inventive purveyors of the form returns with pitch-perfect, genre-bending stories that stare into the abyss of our national character. . . . An exquisite work from a writer whose reach is galactic.”—Oprah DailyBooker Prize winner George Saunders returns with his first collection of short stories since the New York Times bestseller Tenth of December.

The “best short-story writer in English” (Time) is back with a masterful collection that explores ideas of power, ethics, and justice and cuts to the very heart of what it means to live in community with our fellow humans. With his trademark prose—wickedly funny, unsentimental, and exquisitely tuned—Saunders continues to challenge and surprise: Here is a collection of prismatic, resonant stories that encompass joy and despair, oppression and revolution, bizarre fantasy and brutal reality.

“Love Letter” is a tender missive from grandfather to grandson, in the midst of a dystopian political situation in the (not too distant, all too believable) future, that reminds us of our obligations to our ideals, ourselves, and one another. “Ghoul” is set in a Hell-themed section of an underground amusement park in Colorado and follows the exploits of a lonely, morally complex character named Brian, who comes to question everything he takes for granted about his reality. In “Mother’s Day,” two women who loved the same man come to an existential reckoning in the middle of a hailstorm. In “Elliott Spencer,” our eighty-nine-year-old protagonist finds himself brainwashed, his memory “scraped”—a victim of a scheme in which poor, vulnerable people are reprogrammed and deployed as political protesters. And “My House”—in a mere seven pages—comes to terms with the haunting nature of unfulfilled dreams and the inevitability of decay.

Together, these nine subversive, profound, and essential stories coalesce into a case for viewing the world with the same generosity and clear-eyed attention Saunders does, even in the most absurd of circumstances.

Saunders’ words smell like Hunter S. Thompson, Stephen King, Raymond Carver and David Lynch sharing a spliff in Joni Mitchell’s parking lot ― THE WORD FACTORY

A morally passionate, serious writer … He will be read long after these times have passed — ZADIE SMITH

Saunders has revealed himself to be nothing less than an American Gogol: funny, pointed, full of nuance, and always writing with a moral heart. This, his first book of short fiction in nearly a decade, only cements the validity of such a point of view. The nine pieces here are smart and funny, speculative yet at the same time written on a human scale, narratives full of love and loss and longing and the necessity of trying to connect . A tour de force collection that showcases all of Saunders’ many skills

― KIRKUS

George Saunders makes you feel as though you are reading fiction for the first time — KHALED HOSSEINI

What warm, kindhearted and radical writing. Such delicacy, such serious wit. I love it — MAX PORTER

He makes the all-but-impossible look effortless. We’re lucky to have him — JONATHAN FRANZEN

A luminous feat of generosity and humanism — COLSON WHITEHEAD

Saunders is a true original – restlessly inventive, yet deeply humane — JENNIFER EGAN

Funny, poignant – in flashes, deeply moving – light as a feather and consistently weird — HARI KUNZRU