Strange, funny stories that break your heart, without warning, with plain human decency.
Tenth of December
In ten stories about people under pressure, Saunders finds moments when even the worst circumstances leave room for decency.
278g
Weighs the same as Banana + Top Ramen + Mini Bic Lighter
- Luxury Item
- Changes the Way You See
- Fiction (stories)
This Saunders collection from 2013 has strange and funny stories set a half-step into a future that seems so entirely plausible. When, without warning, they break your heart with plain human decency, you have to invent some new emotional state to take it all in at once. He writes about class, family, and survival with a manic humor and a tender heart that will absolutely floor you. It is a heavy book that leaves you feeling lighter and somehow kinder on the other side.
Field notes
“The Semplica Girl Diaries” began with a dream in which Saunders saw impoverished women suspended like lawn ornaments. More disturbing than the image was his own reaction: he was pleased with his new decorations. The story took fourteen years to finish. During that time, Saunders's daughters were growing up, and his experience of family happiness was changing his fiction. His earlier collections had emerged from an awakening to capitalism's cruelty; now he found himself increasingly interested in people's unexpected capacity for kindness. Throughout Tenth of December, love and moral blindness coexist, sometimes within the same character. Saunders had discovered that acknowledging human cruelty needn't mean surrendering to it.