The reader may come to the conclusion that those internal faults are the causes of his problems and not the outside forces that the character blames.

Told from his point of view, the reader becomes privy to all of his insecurities, ambitions, pride, and anger. The most darkly funny – or funnily dark – of the stories in this collection.Ī failing store owner participates in a charity auction. Written in the form of a memo from a project manager attempting to boost the morale of his staff. Or it’s just a cool sci-fi story about psychoactive chemical experiments. The story shifts between their points of view, demonstrating the consequences of an inability to see things from the perspective of others.Īn exploration of the nature of evil, the justifications used to commit evil, and the agency of people to avoid committing it. One upper-middle class woman shops for a puppy for her spoiled children. They are all…different.Įxploring themes of abuse, love, regret, and attempts at forgiveness in the span of two pages, a son reflects on his father’s tradition of decorating of a pole for the holidays.

The “stream of consciousness” of each of the characters is reflected in each of their points of view. The story switches between the point of view of the girl, the neighbor boy, and the kidnapper. The following stories are in this collection:Ī boy decides whether to help a girl who is being kidnapped. They all elicit emotion from the reader and examine complex subject matter. But they are not just soulless intellectual exercises. George Saunders experiments with the forms of stories, so they’re kind of weird. People in the 20th century had Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald. George Saunders stories are most likely going to be included in a bunch of textbooks as examples of great early 21st century literature (if they aren’t already). If you Google “Best books 2013,” Tenth of December is going to pop up on most resulting lists. I wanted to explore more of his writing, so I bought Tenth of December. Lincoln in the Bardo is his first novel he primarily wrote short stories before that. I read that earlier this year and loved it. George Saunders won the 2017 Man Booker Prize for his novel Lincoln in the Bardo.

Tenth of December is a collection of short stories by George Saunders that was published in 2013. It was like either: (A) I was a terrible guy who was knowingly doing this rotten thing over and over, or (B) it wasn’t so rotten, really, just normal, and the way to confirm it was normal was to keep doing it, over and over.

Tenth of december book review