CivilWarLand in Bad Decline


CivilWarLand in Bad Decline is a book of short stories and a novella by the American writer George Saunders. Published in 1996, it was Saunders's first book. Many of the stories initially appeared in different forms in various magazines, including Kenyon Review, Harper's, The New Yorker and Quarterly West. The collection was listed as a New York Times Notable Book of 1996, as well as a finalist for the 1996 PEN/Hemingway Award.

Contents

Reception

In a rave review in The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani had high praise for Saunders' writing style: "He's a savage satirist with a sentimental streak who delineates, in these pages, the dark underbelly of the American dream: the losses, delusions and terrors suffered by the lonely, the disenfranchised, the downtrodden and the plain unlucky." Comparing him to Nathanael West, she concluded, "Mr. Saunders' satiric vision of America is dark and demented; it's also ferocious and very funny." A reviewer for Kirkus Reviews wrote that the "politics of scarcity are brilliantly fictionalized in these smart and understated stories".
Novelist Thomas Pynchon also saw in Saunders a vital new voice in American fiction: "An astoundingly tuned voice—graceful, dark, authentic, and funny—telling just the kinds of stories we need to get us through these times.”
In Publishers Weekly, a reviewer lauded Saunders as having a rich vision and "occasionally heart-melting prose", but stated that there is little difference in voice to distinguish one story from another.
Richard Eder wrote in the Los Angeles Times that "Saunders can be wickedly ingenious and very funny. He takes a conversational line and disrupts it into comic disquiet. Saunders is an imaginative ironist and an inventive absurdist". However, Eder also argued that the author has a weaker sense of moral engagement than satirists like George Orwell and Jonathan Swift, as well as too little narration, with the critic billing "Bounty" as "a series of scenes set one beside the other without much sense of development".

Awards, Honors and Other Appearances