‘Fox 8’ by George Saunders

It’s not just about a canny dreamer of a fox who learns how to speak ‘Yuman’ by doing a Little Matchstick Girl stunt outside a house not far from his Den… Oh no! It’s also a mind-map of how to tell stories (as in, how to put one together). The word ‘story’ is mentioned 16 times. “One leson I lerned during my nites at that Yuman window was: a gud riter will make the reeder feel as bad as the Yuman does in there Story. Like the riter will make you feel as bad as Sinderela. You will feel sad you cannot go to the danse. And mad you have to sweep. You will feel like biting Stepmother on her Gown. Or, if you are Penokio, you will feel like: I wud rather not be made of wud. I wud rather be made of skin, so my father Jipeta will stop hitting me with a hamer. And so farth.” Saunders like to ‘play’ and through Fox 8’s newfound understanding of how people anthropomorphise, we get to see how ridiculous our approach to life really is. Then there’s our grotesque co-dependency with capitalism, running alongside our complete dislocation from nature. The narrator is funny, naïve, dreamy and cute. But he’s too trusting. His fellow foxes are losing their habitat, there’s no food to be had, everything is changing and dying and when one of his mates meets a brutal end, Fox 8 tries to address humanity. There’s pure wild entrepreneurship to how Saunders dives into his stories, the beauty of his world-building, blatant havoc and he how jumps back out again laughing. “Now, one thing I lerned from Storys is, when something big is about to okur, a riter will go: Then it hapened!” I think Saunders missed a trick through, Fox 8 should’ve talked directly to him at the end.

First published in The Guardian, 21st October, 2017, and in print as a standalone, Fox 8, Bloomsbury, 2018

‘Sea Oak’ by George Saunders

‘Sea Oak’ unfolds in a dystopian, funhouse-mirror version of America – an over-sugared, blaring idiocracy. The narrator lives in a “dangerous craphole” with his sister and cousin, their babies, and long-suffering Aunt Bernie who works thanklessly for minimum wage to support the family (a modern-day Ma Parker). Tragically, Aunt Bernie dies of fright when an intruder breaks into their apartment, only to return soon afterwards from the dead, strangely transformed and emboldened.

What I find irresistible is George Saunders’ quasi-anthropological commitment to the particularities of his fictional world, from the depraved reality shows on TV to the details of the narrator’s workplace (an aviation-themed strip club called Joysticks). There’s also a delightful string of walk-on characters, including the priest who declares that upon discovering Aunt Bernie’s newly-vacated grave, he “literally sat down in astonishment.” And so the story thunders along in its full-throated madness and surreal glory, until – like a magician who has artfully misdirected the audience – Saunders throws out a dazzling ending you didn’t see coming at all. I’ve read it so many times, and each time I literally sit down in astonishment.

First published in The New Yorker, December 1998, and collected in Pastoralia, Bloomsbury, 2000. Available to read online in The Barcelona Review here

‘Fox 8’ by George Saunders

‘Fox 8’ was my introduction to George Saunders, when the story was printed in The Guardian in 2017. While Fox 8 himself – whose fox family all go by numbers – is sassy, funny, and optimistic, his optimism is shaken by the ecological destruction done by Yumans as they build their Par King and Mawl, so he decides to write a letter to the Yumans, telling them how it is for the foxes.

Some may be put off by Fox 8’s unique spellings – try not to be. The spellings add a huge amount to the story, not least atmosphere.

“Deer Reeder:
First may I say, sorry for any werds I spel rong. Because I am a fox! So don’t rite or spel perfect. But here is how I lerned to rite and spel as gud as I do!…”

First published in The Guardian in 2017, and in print as a standalone, Fox 8, Bloomsbury, 2018. You can listen to it here, read by George Saunders himself, but you lose the amazing spellings

‘Liberation Day’ by George Saunders

‘Liberation Day’ is very different from ‘Fox 8’, and is one of the strangest and most disturbing stories I have ever read, and utterly compelling. It’s a typically inventive Saunders story, this time a blend of science fiction, horror, social commentary and historical perspectives. I found it almost impossible at the beginning of the story to understand what was going on. Gradually the horror becomes revealed, and after a few pages I was invested.

The main character, Jeremy, is unaware of the true circumstances of his life – at least for the first three-quarters of the story. This kind of deliberately-induced amnesia seems to be a theme with Saunders, and is itself akin to social commentary. Jeremy is a kind of slave. He belatedly realises this, but opts not to have his memory reset to a blank slate, and to live out his life in growing consciousness of inequity and exploitation. Horrifying, weird, darkly comic, tragic, and worth re-reading more than once.

Like all of Saunders’ stories, including ‘Fox 8’, this story contains many layers of meaning.

First published in Liberation Day, Random House, 2022

‘Escape from Spiderhead’ by George Saunders

If you get to the end of this selection, you’ll notice that the many of the following pieces all coalesce around a subtheme, which is that they are fave stories from fave collections. The former were very hard to extract from the latter, so I wanted to mention each story as a choice in and of itself but also a synecdoche for the collections that they are contained within. ‘Escape From Spiderhead’ is a seminal piece from a seminal collection (please ignore the offensively underwhelming Netflix movie adaptation from 2022). The story is set in a luxurious high security drug testing facility, with characters that are infused with different drugs which influence their emotional states and behaviour. The story is unctuously satisfying in its playfulness with language. The real-time internal monologues of the main character, Jeff, that track his emotional modulation, are somehow at once tender and deeply unsettling. The merging of the familiar yet contrasting languages of bureaucratic big-tech and awkward interpersonal intimacy is both hilarious and very sad, but it’s the ending of the story, where this clipped, emotional sterility breaks out into descriptions of the garden surrounding the Spiderhead compound, that does it for me.

First published in The New Yorker, December 2010. Collected in Tenth of December, Random House, 2013. You can access it here

‘Offloading for Mrs. Schwartz’ by George Saunders

There’s a brilliant slime of technology here, in a story about a miserable widow and the commodification of memories. Saunders’ descriptions ooze and the characters are full-hearted and hazy at their edges, bleeding slightly into the world around them and their narrator, who is keen to love but not skilled at it. The ending is a sly wallop — like falling asleep in a bath, only waking up when you slide in too far.

First published in The New Yorker, September 27, 1992. Collected in CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, Random House, 1996. Read online here

‘Love Letter’ by George Saunders

I can vividly recall reading this when it was first published, when Trump was still president, when we all thought Biden could never take the fight to him, when four more years seemed a probability, not just a possibility. And then what? What would he have done with four more years?

‘Love Letter’ gives one possible answer to that. A loving, beautiful letter from a grandfather to his grandson in a future America, where the Trump family has stolen the presidency, where letters are opened and read and keyboards are tracked. My new book, After London, describes a Britain under a surveillance government, and this does the same for America, but in only three pages, and with Saunders’s exquisite eye for human love and pain.

I’ve just reread it and it is still chilling. How close American came to disaster. And how close it may come again.

Published in The New Yorker, April 6 2020, and available to subscribers to read here

‘The Semplica Girl Diaries’ by George Saunders

This short story is about morality and integrity, addressing questions of immigration, racism, and about inequalities in society. The story nudges and probes the reader to look for answers within themselves, question their own privilege and biases. This is written in form of a diary, with short sentence fragments composed as a stream of consciousness. But it is of course a really well-crafted story where every sentence is in its perfect place. I like everything that George Saunders writes.

First published in The New Yorker, October 8, 2012, and available to subscribers to read here, and collected in Tenth of December, Bloomsbury, 2013

‘The Semplica-Girl Diaries’ by George Saunders

Though it’s already a modern classic, I only discovered this story a couple of years ago when I started teaching a course on writing short fiction, something I knew next to nothing about. I’ve hardly written any, and my dirty little book secret has always been that I never read short stories either. There were a few obvious choices for this list, but it wasn’t a question of what to leave out; in fact, it took me quite a while to come up with twelve. The truth is, I’ve never really had a nose for the stuff a writer is supposed to have read. Many of my picks for this list I stumbled across quite randomly in libraries or bookshops before I was 20; after that, I seem to have done my best to ignore contemporary short story collections, and to avoid the acknowledged masters of the form. I always used to tell people I found them frustrating, that if I was invested in a world I wanted to stay there as long as possible, but I’m really not sure that’s true. It just became a blind spot that I couldn’t shake. That’s changed lately, at last, and Saunders was a big wake-up call. This story is just about as good as he gets, and that’s an awful lot better than most writers, in any form. He’s supposed to have dreamed the set-up one night, and then taken fifteen years to make it work as fiction. The point is, he really really did.

First published in The New Yorker, October 2012, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in Tenth of December, Bloomsbury, 2013. Also available online here

‘Al Roosten’ by George Saunders

No map of my psycho-fictional-geography would be complete without a nod to George Saunders and Tenth of December, my favourite of his collections. He’s like an acupuncturist who somehow knows your internal nervous system so well that he can just reach over and prod you somewhere and before you know it you’re laughing and crying simultaneously.

Al Roosten is a painful and very funny exploration of one man stranded in his own life, yo-yoing between over-confident aloofness and crushing self-doubt. It opens with him backstage at a Local Celebrities charity auction, comparing himself to a buff, swimsuit-wearing rival. When he eventually follows him on stage, a new bar is set for literary cringe:

Roosten stepped warily out from behind the paper screen. No one whooped. He started down the runway. No cheering. The room made the sound a room makes when attempting not to laugh. He tried to smile sexily but his mouth was too dry. Probably his yellow teeth were showing and the place where his gums dipped down. Frozen in the harsh spotlight, he looked so crazy and old and forlorn and yet residually arrogant that an intense discomfort settled on the room, a discomfort that, in a non-charity situation, might have led to shouted insults or thrown objects but in this case drew a kind of pity whoop from near the salad bar.

Al is tormented by the life he’s been given by a culture that is full of paradoxes and disappointment, that asks such strange mental athletics of identity to feel like you have a role with value. It moves effortlessly between his self-critical and self-congratulatory POV and objective third person narration, no mean feat. The painfully flawed antihero has never been in more masterful hands.

First published in The New Yorker, February 2009, and available to subscribers to read here, and collected in Tenth of December, Random House/Bloomsbury, 2013

‘Pastoralia’ by George Saunders

Cynthia Ozick says … a short story is more like the talismanic gift given to the protagonist of a fairy tale – something complete, powerful, whose power may not yet be understood, which can be held in the hands or tucked into the pocket and taken through the forest on the dark journey.

Saunders is one of those writers who had a powerful influence on me when I started writing, and this story is the one that has stuck with me for eighteen years. Absurd, slightly twisted reality is nothing new in literature – I’d read a lot of Vonnegut when I was young – but Saunders’ combination of deadpan surrealism, a perfect blend of pedantic corporate- and slacker-speak, and a genuinely humane appreciation of the ways in which late capitalism fucks with our heads? That really was. Above all, Saunders trusts the reader to go with him, to work out what’s going on. Reading it gave me the gift – a talisman, if you will – of knowing that such things could be done. It helped me get going – as soon, of course, as I stopped trying to imitate the inimitable.

‘Pastoralia’ depicts an anthropological amusement park in which the narrator and his colleague, Janet, share a cave, are given a raw goat and a box of matches each day – a rare privilege – and are expected to grunt, not talk in English. Janet chafes against the absurdity and cruelty of it all; the narrator worries her chafing will get them both in trouble:

“Will you freaking talk to me?” she says. “This is important. Don’t be a dick for once.”
I do not consider myself a dick and I do not appreciate being called a dick, in the cave, in English, and the truth is, if she would try a little harder not to talk in the cave, she would not be so much in the shit.

Published in The New Yorker, April 3, 2000, and included in the collection Pastoralia, Bloomsbury, 2001

‘Escape from Spiderhead’ by George Saunders

On the surface this is a dystopian short story about the corporate abuse of science. Convicts with relatives able to raise the necessary funds can transfer from prison onto a drug testing project. Jeff, the narrator, takes advantage of the scheme and dons a MobiPak^TM, which enables researchers to chemically modify his moods, passions, sexual arousal, feelings of attachment and verbal eloquence. As the experiment takes an even more alarming turn, Jeff realises his survival depends on escaping from the drug regime. A lesser writer might have produced a mere socio-political satire from this material: those elements are present, but George Saunders also peels away the comfortable delusion that we control their own behaviour. The story also highlights the plasticity of our beliefs, attachments and personalities. ‘Escape from Spiderhead’ is by turns a fascinating thriller and a deeply unsettling contemplation of human psychology.

First published in The New Yorker in December 2010 and collected in Tenth of December, Bloomsbury, 2013

‘The Wavemaker Falters’ by George Saunders

Eventually, I got tired of Saunders’ schtick. By the time Tenth of December came out, I was thoroughly bored with the weird amusement parks, the experimental prisons and labs, the coy ad-speak. It was as though every story fit one of four moulds, that Saunders kept re-iterating again, and again. It’s sometimes hard to remember, then, just how much I loved his first collection, when this was all new to me, when I couldn’t yet see the seams of what he was doing and instead was weeping at all the lost souls. Perhaps nobody’s life broke me harder than the narrator of ‘The Wavemaker Falters’, a man in charge of a wavemaker at a weird amusement park (check) whose negligence leads to the death of a young boy, and of his attempts at living with what he had done. (His love-life mirrors that of the character in the Söderberg story as well, I note now that I am writing this.)

Re-reading the story for the first time in over a decade in preparation for this Personal Anthology, I feel as though I’d found a long-lost love letter from someone with whom it ended in tears. George and I may be through, but we will always have Civilwarland.

First published in Witness, November 1993. Collected in Civilwarland in Bad Decline, Random House, 1996

‘Fox 8’ by George Saunders

One day, walking neer one of your Yuman houses, smelling all the interest with snout, I herd, from inside, the most amazing sound. Turns out, what that sound is, was: the Yuman voice, making werds.

I love George Saunders. No, I REALLY love George Saunders. A friend saved me this story from her weekend Guardian. She saved it because it was about foxes and was slightly bemused by my whoops of glee when I saw who the author was.

This is a deceptively simple yet tragic tale of foxes and their difficult relationship with the human-dominated world. But the magic of Saunders is such that his stories work on many levels. This brilliant and engaging story is written in the form of a letter from a fox to a human, and is an allegory not only for our tricky and destructive relationship with the natural world, but also of immigrants and immigration—as seen through an animal’s eyes. Genius.

Published in The Guardian, 21^st October, 2017. Read it online here