So there was something strangely familiar and deliciously destructive to be found when George Saunders’s CivilWarLand in Bad Decline appeared in January of 1996. Our favorite song was “Macarena (Bayside Boys remix).” We wanted to dance and we wanted to watch our world end in flames. The internet was only for the lonely who wanted to chat with other lonely people with names like WaffleMan7675 and PrincessStarfish123.
We had survived hair metal’s demise, grunge’s implosion, the unsolved murders of Biggie Smalls and Tupac, and the arrival of Spicemania. We wanted synthetic fabrics and synthetic drugs. We were into irony and soup served in bread bowls. We were three years away from Y2K, four years from Florida’s Votomatic nightmare, and five years from 9/11. is scary, hilarious, and unforgettable.”-Tobias Wolff “Saunders makes the all-but-impossible look effortless.”-Jonathan Franzen “Not since Twain has America produced a satirist this funny.”-Zadie Smith “An astoundingly tuned voice-graceful, dark, authentic, and funny-telling just the kinds of stories we need to get us through these times.What was 1996? And what is it to us who now stand steeped in the pathogen and plastic and paranoia of now? Twenty-five years ago, gas was cheap and college was relatively affordable.
Praise for George Saunders and CivilWarLand in Bad Decline “It’s no exaggeration to say that short story master George Saunders helped change the trajectory of American fiction.”-The Wall Street Journal “Saunders’s satiric vision of America is dark and demented it’s also ferocious and very funny.”-Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times “George Saunders is a writer of arresting brilliance and originality, with a sure sense of his material and apparently inexhaustible resources of voice. With a new introduction by Joshua Ferris and a new author’s note by Saunders himself, this edition is essential reading for those seeking to discover or revisit a virtuosic, disturbingly prescient voice. In six stories and a novella, Saunders hatches an unforgettable cast of characters, each struggling to survive in an increasingly haywire world. Since its publication in 1996, George Saunders’s debut collection has grown in esteem from a cherished cult classic to a masterpiece of the form, inspiring an entire generation of writers along the way.
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