Word: saunderses
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Throughout his newest collection of short stories, “In Persuasion Nation,” George Saunders constantly manipulates—and exaggerates—familiar words and situations just to the point where we must perform a double-take before laughing at their absurdity.
Since his first book, “CivilWarland in Bad Decline,” published in 1996, Saunders has made a name for himself and attracted a devoted fan-base by creating what reviewers love to hail as “dystopian fantasies.”
However, the serious achievement of these mostly very funny narratives is their uncanny points of resemblance to our “real” reality—the reality of “reality” being something that Saunders, with his predilection for describing individuals trapped in hegemonic, perspective...
In “In Persuasion Nation,” perhaps to a greater extent than in his previous collections, Saunders often borrows from the language and stock characters of mass-market advertising. In the title story, for instance, the disembodied “voiceover” intones its way...
In several of the stories—and in the fictional “Taskbook for the New Nation,” from which he has lifted the epigraphs to the book’s four sections—Saunders also draws on the semantically void self-inflations of the...