George Saunders’ (he of a recent Rumpus Book Club convo) newish short story collection masterpiece Tenth of December has garnered an impressive selection of praise from some of the biggest of literary guns. And the hits keep coming.
Aaron Thier over at The Nation finally adds his two cents to the growing pile of critical change, and not surprisingly, his thoughts are mighty positive. Alluding to the US’s recent financial woes, Their describes the boon it’s been for Saunders’ writing:
The financial collapse of 2008 was terrible for many people, but it was a terrific boon to George Saunders, or at least to his fiction, which has always found a rich vein of material for satire in the income gap between America’s rich and poor. His newest collection, Tenth of December, is remarkably faithful to the spirit of his earlier work, but his stories only become sharper and more relevant as the income gap widens and our America comes more and more to resemble the land of his own cartoonish, not entirely dark imagination.
Yes, singing the praise of Mr. Saunders isn’t anything we haven’t heard before, but with a book as masterfully penned as Tenth of December we’re happy to keep on reading it and keep on passing it along.
