Pastoralia

By George Saunders,

Book cover of Pastoralia

Book description

'Saunders is an astoundingly tuned voice - graceful, dark, authentic and funny - telling just the kind of stories we need to get us through these times' Thomas Pynchon

In PASTORALIA elements of contemporary life are twisted, merged and amplified into a slightly skewed version of modern America. A couple…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Pastoralia as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Specifically, I'm recommending the short story "Sea Oak." In the expanse of horror fiction, it has to be said that there are very few stories about a kindly old woman who returns from the dead as a pissed-off, vulgar, rotting corpse demanding her nephew start showing his cock (Saunders’s phrasing, not mine) for extra money so that his family can stop being pushovers and start earning some cash. George Saunders, it should be noted, is not remotely a horror author—rather, one of the more offbeat, distinctive writers of short literary fiction of the last quarter century—and Pastoralia is determinedly not…

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