George Saunders

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George Saunders bigraphy, stories - American writer

George Saunders : biography

02 December 1958 –

George Saunders (born December 2, 1958) is a New York Times bestselling American writer of short stories, essays, novellas and children’s books. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, McSweeney’s and GQ, among other publications. He also contributed a weekly column, American Psyche, to the weekend magazine of The Guardians Saturday edition until October 2008.

A professor at Syracuse University, Saunders won the National Magazine Award for fiction in 1994, 1996, 2000, and 2004, and second prize in the O. Henry Awards in 1997. His first story collection, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, was a finalist for the 1996 PEN/Hemingway Award. In 2006 Saunders received a MacArthur Fellowship. In 2006 he won the World Fantasy Award for his short story "CommComm". His story collection In Persuasion Nation was a finalist for The Story Prize in 2007. In 2013, he won the PEN/Malamud Awardhttp://www.pw.org/content/saunders_wins_penmalamud_award

Career as author

From 1989 to 1996, Saunders worked as a technical writer and geophysical engineer for Radian International, an environmental engineering firm in Rochester, New York. He also worked for a time with an oil exploration crew in Sumatra. Since 1997, Saunders has been on the faculty of Syracuse University, teaching creative writing in the school’s MFA program while continuing to publish highly acclaimed fiction and nonfiction. In 2006, Saunders was awarded a $500,000 MacArthur Fellowship. In the same year he was also awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. He was a Visiting Writer at Wesleyan University and Hope College in 2010 and participated in Wesleyan’s Distinguished Writers Series and Hope College’s Visiting Writers Series. His nonfiction collection, The Braindead Megaphone, was published on September 4, 2007. discussing The Braindead Megaphone. While promoting The Braindead Megaphone, Saunders appeared on The Colbert Report and the Late Show with David Letterman.

Saunders’s fiction often focuses on the absurdity of consumerism and corporate culture and the role of mass media. While many reviewers mention the satirical tone in most of Saunders’s writing, his work also raises moral questions. The tragicomic element in his writing has earned Saunders comparisons to Kurt Vonnegut, whose work inspired Saunders.

The film rights to CivilWarLand in Bad Decline were purchased by Ben Stiller in the late 1990s, and the project remains in development by Stiller’s company, Red Hour Productions. Saunders has also written a feature-length screenplay based on his story "Sea Oak".

Saunders considered himself an Objectivist in his twenties but is now repulsed by the philosophy, comparing it to neoconservative thinking. He is now a student of Nyingma Buddhism."George Saunders Has Written the Best Book You’ll Read This Year" by Joel Lovell, The New York Times Magazine, January 3, 2013

Books

Fiction

  • CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (1996) (short stories and a novella)
  • Pastoralia (2000) (short stories and a novella)
  • The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip (2000) (novella with illustrations by Lane Smith) (New York Times bestseller)
  • The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil (2005) (novella)
  • In Persuasion Nation (2006) (short stories)
  • Tenth of December: Stories (2013) (short stories) (New York Times bestseller)
  • "Fox 8" (2013) (short story)

Nonfiction

  • A Bee Stung Me, So I Killed All the Fish (Notes from the Homeland 2003–2006) (2006) (promotional chapbook of essays, limited to 500 copies to accompany the book In Persuasion Nation)
  • The Braindead Megaphone (2007) (collected essays)

Anthologies

  • Fakes: An Anthology of Pseudo-Interviews, Faux-Lectures, Quasi-Letters, "Found" Texts, and Other Fraudulent Artifacts, edited by David Shields and Matthew Vollmer (2012)

Notes

Early life and education

Saunders was born in Amarillo, Texas, and grew up in the south suburbs of Chicago. He is a graduate of Oak Forest High School in Oak Forest, Illinois, a southern suburb of Chicago. In 1981 Saunders received a B.S. in geophysical engineering from Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colorado. Speaking of his scientific background, Saunders said "…any claim I might make to originality in my fiction is really just the result of this odd background: basically, just me working inefficiently, with flawed tools, in a mode I don’t have sufficient background to really understand. Like if you put a welder to designing dresses." In 1988, he obtained an M.A. in creative writing from Syracuse University.