CivilWarLand in Bad Decline: Stories and a Novella

I bought this book because I absolutely loved "Tenth of December," Saunders' latest book of short stories. Although I know "CivilWarLand in Bad Decline" appeals to many readers and got rave reviews, the stories were too "way out there" for my taste. I just didn't enjoy reading these beautifully crafted stories with their science-fiction aspect.

I didn't actively dislike this book, but I did find it to be terribly one-note and strangely unmoving. Perhaps it's that Roald Dahl's adult fiction and Peter Carey's short stories have covered much if this same ground, but more evocatively for me?

This book is clever in a tedious way. What starts out seeming clever quickly gets tedious. A good book to rapidly skim after reading two or three pages. That way you can appreciate the cleverness before it gets tedious.

This is an odd book. Don't care for it. The characters describe what's happening as if they're watching the events happen to someone else. Lack of emotion and unrealistic reactions to events. Don't like it and probably won't finish it.

Dystopian literature is rarely this amusing, but Saunders has the knack of knowing just the right tone to take, to tell us about a company that captures and relocates racoons for harried homeowners, but in fact beats them to death and buries them behind the office. Or about a post-cataclysmic world where there are Normals and Flaweds (all with some genetic mutation such as a vestigial tail, or claws, or a double row of teeth) and where it's legal to round up Flaweds and sell them in the slave market. 

John Wyndham's Re-Birth (The Chrysalids in the UK) dealt with similar themes, but while both writers see the world as dark and threatening, Saunders is able to find the humor in even the most horrific events, such as the protagonist  being sold to a brothel, and when the claws on his feet are discovered, there's a long discussion by his new owners about how he might accidentally claw a customer, and the brothel would get sued, so he has to be put to doing drive-through hand-jobs.

I expected a lot from Saunders on the strength of Lincoln in the Bardo, and though this volume is quite different, the warmth of Saunders' writing still comes through. He is, for all the dark, and sometimes mean humor, essentially a humane writer, who understands how hard it is to be human in the best of circumstances.  And in the worst?  Well, we do what we can, and take care of our own.  I admit I took a while to warm to the stories, but once I did, I found them quite wonderful.  And the author's note taught me more about writing in a few pages than whole volumes of manuals have done.  Saunders has found his authentic voice, and it's funny, and touching, and honest.  It's also a little grotesque, but that's part of his charm.

No question that Saunders can write his a** off. He has a distinctive voice that's a pleasure to read...my problem, at least based on this collection of short stories and one novella, is that if you've read one Saunder's story, you've read them all... I like Saunder's dystopian landscapes...Saunder's paints a bleak and disturbing picture...what makes the stories quickly get old is that Saunder's protagonists are emasculated, ineffective, weak...lack agency; more to the point, Saunders satirizes/mocks secondary characters who try to take some type of initiative...

It's easy to understand why the critics would love this sort of depressing, hand-wringing writing. Saunders the heir of Vonnegut? Hardly.

Some 20 years or so have passed since the issuance of George Saunders' first book, and it is interesting to compare what he was writing then and what he is writing now. The six stories and one novella in this early collection are unremittingly dark. As many have noted, the tone and texture of the stories does not change much. They all seem to be cut from the same cloth. Saunders has grown appreciably in the last 20 years, and his vision has lightened, at least a bit.

These stories will not be for everyone. Saunders thinks little of contemporary society and does not see much future for us. At the same time, the stories are wickedly funny. He has a terrific eye and ear, and he catches the way the poor and downtrodden think, act, talk and feel.

While his later work has a broader feel to it and is not so thoroughly dark and gloomy, the early stories are well worth reading. Unfortunately for us, Saunders is very adept at showing us at our laughable worst. Anyone who has ever been down and out; had a horrible dead end job; been the victim of moronic behavior; or suffered the cruel bullying of those who push other people around and mistreat them just because they can will see themselves in these stories. There is something therapeutic in realizing that you are not alone. If you have ever been overwhelmed by human misery, these stories are for you. You will feel better for having read them.

CIVILWARLAND IN BAD DECLINE, George Saunder’s 1996 masterful collection of six short stories and a novella, is a brilliant, creative and imaginative assemblage of pseudo-dystopian stories by the award-winning author best known for TENTH OF DECEMBER. The key word to his work is imaginative, creating stories of relatable characters in odd and often unsettling situations. My favorite, “The 400-Pound CEO,” is about Tim, an obese employee of Human Raccoon Recovery, a business that promises humane removal of raccoons, but in reality buries them in a Lyme pit behind the office. The pathos of the obese is a clichéd theme, but in Saunders’ hand it takes on a somber, disturbing slant, with the nastiness of his co-workers going above and beyond any realistic cruelty. When a co-worker goes out with him to win a bet to be seen with him in public, Saunders breaks not just Tim’s heart but the reader’s as well. “Downtrodden Mary…” is narrated by an older lady who works at an odd museum, complete with pickled babies and fairy tale castles. “Offloading for Mrs. Schwartz” enters the realm of sci-fi, with Saunders describing the world of virtual reality, where you can take someone’s memories from them and sell them to the highest bidder. “The Wavemaker Falters” concerns a man at a water-park who accidently killed a young boy in the wavemaking machine who’s being cuckolded by his boss. The crowing jewel is a slim novella that takes place in a dystopian future where the country is divided between the Normals and the Flawed, individuals with some form of birth defect. The flawed narrator, who has clawed feet, takes the reader on a harrowing journey from New York to New Mexico, dodging slave traders (the Flawed are slaves and the 13th Amendment has been repealed), disgruntled hobos, cruel pimps and Normals with questionable parenting advice. Saunders doesn’t explain everything, leaving the reader to imagine the scary future, where selling raccoons (again raccoons!) on a stick with a lemon wedge passes for gourmet food. From a brothel in a burnt out Safeway to a slavers’ pit behind the Wendy’s, Saunders creativity and heart takes flight as Cole crosses the country in peril to rescue his sister, remembering how the two came to be parentless in the first place. Saunders has crafted a vivid collection of stories that will stay with the reader for a long time after the cover is shut and the book is wedged back on the shelf.

Civilwarland in Bad Decline is a collection of short stories and one novella written by George Saunders. George Saunders has a unique view of the human condition. The book was hard to put down.

The stories are set in the United States, but it is the United States sometime in the future or it is a parallel dimension. The stories are darkly humorous and disturbing. The portrayal of the human condition is disconcertingly accurate. These are stories of normal, flawed people who try their hardest and often fail or are taken advantage of.

I wouldn’t recommend this book for youth, it is most definitely an adult book. There are a few disturbing scenes. Issues such as murder, sabotage, and slavery are discussed. Surprisingly, I found it worth my while.

I have seen the future (through George Saunders' eyes) and it's awfully bleak. It is also presented in a narrative style that is utterly captivating, compelling, and yes, humorous. Comparisons to Vonnegut's futuristic short stories in "Welcome to the Monkey House" are valid, but KV's cynicism about the human race was tempered by an abiding compassion. Saunders' extrapolated future from today's signs of decay, exploitation, and violence is all too plausible, and therefore, for me, is about as scary as speculative fiction gets.

There are, thankfully, some stories and characters that have nobility and compassion, and manage to effect, in a couple of instances, a hopeful outcome. Many of the protagonists are, however, impotent victims of abuse and degradation at the hands of the societal "winners." The stories in this collection, and the novella, are all loosely connected by a world of nightmarish theme parks, and mutant humans whose "mutagenic" deformities horrifically hint at genetically modified foods and other environmental degradations. Of course, it can all be viewed as scathing satire of (post)modern life, and a clarion call to action to avoid such a dystopian future.

Like Vonnegut, and one might also invoke Kafka, Dick, Orwell,(and I think even Selby in terms of dystopian despair), Saunders is not a genre writer, but a creator of literature that will probably stand the test of time, unless some of the dire changes he envisions come to pass...

After completing all of the stories in CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, it has never been clearer what an original, thrilling voice George Saunders is. In story after story, the humor is bitter and incisive, finding the cruelest and cleverest method to deliver a punchline, which would be remarkable even without the staggering, sometimes debilitating pathos the humor comes from - take this section-concluding line from the first story I read in the collection, "The 400 lb. CEO" - "The sun sinks, the moon rises, round and pale as my stupid face." It's a line of scabrous humor, of fluid rhythm, and of profound sadness. Yet as each story rang with the same degree of acid-laced angusih, I began to get a little wary of Saunders one-note style. He excels at it, but each story is a present-tense first-person tragicomedy of occasionally liberating, occasionally deadening trauma. It makes a remarkable read, but one that doesn't demand a straight read - any guess about the type of story you're about to begin would probably be correct, so, it'd only be tiresome to read the book cover to cover. The novella in this collection, "Bounty," is the most apocalyptic of all of Saunders' creations, but even as it becomes a savage, even visionary work, it begins to fall into a tautological loop - one quixotic character after another shows up only to have his/her impish belief systems ridiculed for a few pages, becoming a fairly redundant cycle of humanity reaffirmed and rejected. You'll read through it in no time, but it'll make you wish Saunders had a few more tricks up his sleeve.

Having read CIVILWARLAND IN BAD DECLINE and DECEMBER 10TH by George Saunders, I have decided that "enough is enough". I don't like Saunders' writing or most of his stories. But that's just me. I read a lot. And I do not find his writing to be humorous, satirical, thoughtful or particularly good. Some of it is "creative". If you are a "reader" and are curious, see for yourself.

After hearing George Saunders' name mentioned alonside those of Denis Johnson, Tim O'Brien and Donald Barthelme, modern masters of the short story, I was suprised to find that he only had one small collection in print. After reading that one collection I was shocked to discover that George Saunders has more inborn talent than perhaps any other writer in America today. That he chooses to use that talent in the way he does, crafting edgy, disturbing tales of cultural corruption and alienation, bodes very well for the future of American letters.
The collection draws its title from the first story in the book, probably the best story written by any American author in the last half of the 20th century. Describing the story with any brevity is an almost impossible task. Suffice it to say that it concerns a civil war style theme park director haunted by civil war era ghosts who hires a psychotic Vietnam veteran to rid the park of the gangs who keep invading the place and terrorizing the workers and visitors. This ludicrous story line is sharpened by Suanders' remarkable wit and spirals to a shocking and disturbing conclusion.
Unfortunately, none of the remaining stories in the book equal the brilliance of the first, but none of them really disappoint the reader either. "Isabelle" is strangely moving and "The 400 Pound CEO" is a tragicomedy whose ending is so innevitable that it is almost painful to read. George Saunders from whom there is much to expect and he has the undeniable talent to back up those expectations.

I didn’t care for any of it...Echoes of Vonnegut’s crumbling dystopia (Welcome to the Monkey House, especially) lightly accented with David Foster Wallace (sharp insights and flashes of humanity), with a topping of Archie-Bunkerness (surprise that white + male does NOT guarantee privilege or even fairness).

This collection of short stories (along with the more recent "Pastoralia" collection) will define the course of short fiction in America for years to come. The voice, thematic relevance in all these stories hit home without mercy. No one has written fiction like this, in such a way. Only comparable writers that come to mind are Mark Leyner (who's as funny as Saunders but doesn't bring his stories together as him) David Foster Wallace (too self-engrossed) and Dave Eggers. Odd situations and hallucinatory scenes abound. But they all serve to comment on the modern-day human condition, and they serve that purpose devastatingly. All the characters in these stories are the 'losers' of this world. No one has written about them with more sympathy and candor than Saunders. He doesn't reduce these poor people as caricatured vehicles for his humor, but uses their humanity to point his finger at the laughable veneer of vanity/egotism that envelops the modern American society. A chilling, sad, human collection of stories.

If I could recommend one book published in the last five years, I think this would be the one. I bought this book because I loved David Foster Wallace and he praised it in an interview, but this book shattered all expectations I had.
This is a book that cuts through everything and reimagines the state of humanity. His overexposed lens of a nightmarish future allow Saunders to show us the necessity of humanity in a consummeristic world fraught with unutterable loneliness. The shocking similarities to our own lives is devestating and Saunders is one of the few contemporary writers with a true understanding of the role and necessity of a refigured morality for our lives.
Anyone who wants to write should read these story. This book is what is necessary for literature to find a place in contemporary America.

This is a fantastic look at a future America that is not quite a nightmare yet; however it is a fevered night-sweat full of tossing and turning on sticky polyester blankets.
George Saunders has created a world solely his own, where everything is a scam and the hucksters are everywhere; from the wave-pool to the museums to the theme parks. Everything is for sale and the price is reasonable. Just don't look too closely or you'll notice that the merry facades hide some sinister secrets.
This is one of my favorite books of the last several years and is at the top of my recommended reading list; but beware, this is the type of book that people tend to forget to return. I'd suggest purchasing several copies and, with the holidays approaching, give them as gifts. Trust me, it'll be appreciated. Ray Schmitz III

CivilWarLand in bad decline, by George Saunders, bespeaksscant hope for civilization as we rocket toward the millenium. In stories and a novella, Saunders paints anightmare world that, on minimal examination, turns out tobe nothing more than trends in America today taken to theirlogical conclusions. All of the stories are set in anindeterminate future dominated by antimoral entrepreneurswho gleefully exploit and discard their socio-economic andgenetic inferiors. With relentless, dead-on humorSaunders measures humanity's degradation threshold. Onlycharacters like "Mr Guilt," the 400-pound CEO, and the"flawed" guerilla Cole relieve the bleakness with theirrallying cry to the underclass: "enough already, enough, this is as low as I go."

I think a dosage label should come with all of Saunder's books. It should read

"Read one story per month."

What was your first Saunders? "Offloading for Mrs. Schwartz" was mine. It was in the first issue of The New Yorker with Tina Brown at the helm. I remember this well, because I wrote a review of the "new" New Yorker for my college paper at the time and was super-impressed with Offloading, especially juxtaposed against the boring John Updike short that was also featured in the issue.

In the last 4-5 months, I've read a number of Saunders stories in the New Yorker: "Sea Oak," "The Barber's Unhappiness," and "Pastoralia," all of which are probably featured in his second collection of shorts. I read these stories 2-3 months apart, and I must say, that's the right pace for Saunders.

That brings me to CivilWarLand. Excellent stories, no doubt about it, but when I end up reading one story after next, a rather boring pattern forms:

Royally Screwed Protagonist does Something Stupid and ends up Getting Even More Screwed.

The whole corporate-speak thing gets old fast. It's Orwellian, sure, but when you dip into the well that often, well, you might as well just jump in. (Maybe Murakami will save you, who knows.)

The best stories are the ones with a heart. There's only one of those, and that's Offloading. What a sweet, spectacular ending! It's probably worth the book just for that story alone.

The worst story is the novella, "Bounty." It just doesn't work. Boring.

Still though, Saunders makes me laugh. Writing humor is a tough thing to do, so I have to tip my beenie to Saunders. I don't think there's a funnier writer out there right now.

4 stars

Really enjoyed all the short stories - they were all funny in their own ways, and yet was depressing to think of the world like that. Also, at least once each story each character made me say - wow that's so completely messed up.

Saunders is an exciting writer, one of the bona fide bright spots in contemporary fiction. I love his take on consumer society; it is the perfect antidote to the Wal-Mart-Land we McLive in. And apparently, given the subject matter of his latest collection, he has the critique-of-consumerism-via-unlikely-theme-park domain all to himself. Like Pynchon and Barthelme, Saunders is not a realist, but rather an absurdist with a biting sense of humor. There is, as one reviwer notes, a certain sameness to these stories, but the same could be said about Melville's novels, Stevens's poems, or Bruckner's symphonies. I can't recommend Saunders more enthusiastically, but those who prefer realism should beware.

George Saunders is an excellent new writer in the vein of Denis Johnson ... he is funnier than Johnson, and not quite as wordy in my opinion. That being said, if you like Johnson, you'll like Saunders.
The title story is probably the best in this collection, though I think the "400 Pound CEO" is a close second. Both of these stories have a cruel sense of irony, likeable characters who can't seem to get much right, and a wicked ending. There is a pattern to Saunders' work, but I've never found it monotonous because of the variety of events and turns of plot.
If you're interested in very different fiction, then pick up this slim volume. Be prepared to laugh and be prepared to be more than a little disturbed.

Having earned an MFA in 1991 I came of age in the era of Carver. I only wrote one good short story and like GS I used it on my application. This information does not give me any special perspective; I am rather puzzled that I had not heard of GS until I downloaded (purchased) this collection. I enjoyed the absurdity, the satire of Americana, and the sense of wonder with which his characters are imbued. At times, particularly during the novella (long story) my brain faltered. It was late at night and I was tired and I wanted it to rnd For me, these stories are best enjoyed singely with a bright brain. The sort of alert, available consciousness resulting from several strong cups of java or one's preferred stimulant pays dividends

I just finished re-reading this book, after having found it 8 or 9 years ago.

It's a fun, provocative read.

This time what struck me was how Saunders suffuses his stories of surreal exaggerations of modern life with bureaucratic structures that make the bizarre things that happen and the bizarre situations in the stories seem familiar and reasonable to the characters in them.

So long as we have somebody monitoring our actions, neat categories to organize our jobs and lives, and metrics to measure how well we're doing, we're right at home. The substance doesn't really matter. We can turn anything into an acceptable commodity with a little bit of producty clothing or rational skin ("Chill'n'Pray", "New Employee Observation", "Mobile Embalmer", . . .).

If you like Delillo's White Noise, you'll like this, and v.v.

I think the reason I gave this book 5 stars instead of 4 was for the story "Isabelle" otherwise the book is a 4 star book. The story "Isabelle" has the unique distinction of being one of the few stories to literally make me cry. It was hauntingly beautifully, devastating with a strange edge of hope, and well written. I would recommend this book on this story alone but the other stories were also good if not standard George Saunders. This collection is definitely on the darker side of what he writes and "Civilwarland in Bad Decline" had one of the most haunting endings I have ever experienced from a short story. So, if you are looking for a collection of stories that are intelligent, well written, and thought provoking and do not mind a darker edge then you will get what you are looking for in this book. If you are looking for something light and fun to read you may want to try something else, or a different collection of stories by Saunders.

These days it's understandable if you feel a bit reluctant when you pick up a debut short story collection, leaf through it and find that they're all in first-person, and in (a form of) present tense, to boot!
But trust me, dear reader, dear serious reader, when I tell you to read forth. Saunders puts on an amazing performance. The work of Stanley Elkin comes to mind. And it seems that Saunders is living up to this "early promise": Saunders' stories have appeared in each of the last THREE _Prize Stories: O. Henry Awards_ books.
I just can't wait for something lengthy (yes, yes! a novel! please) by this satirist par excellence. Buy it!

Fifteen pages in, I was fairly certain this would be one of the best short story collections I had ever read. That probably holds, although I was surprised to see, in Bounty and the title story especially, that Saunders often dropped the ball just before the wrap-up in each story. He lost control of the narrative, and it either got too dark, or too sentimental. 90% of the book is outstanding, though, and The 400lb CEO was worth the risk of walking nonchalantly out of the store with this slim volume invisibly tucked into the sleeve of my coat. Am I jesting? (Is he jesting?)

I'm coming very late to the game, having just begun reading CivilWarLand in Bad Decline. I loved "The Wavemaker Falters." And the first half of "The 400-Pound CEO." Saunders has staked out his own very particular patch of Americana. Theme parks are rife for ridicule (in the way that circuses also seem to be). Sometimes he reminds me of Don de Lillo, but new and improved. Sometimes he reminds me of the woman who wrote GEEK LOVE. But I absolutely adored every sentence of "The Wavemaker Falters." I've never read a story so beautiful.

As with any collection of short stories, some are better than others. Its a very dark collection, with crushing failure and abandonment of hope being the typical ending. With the exception of "Bounty" which is almost Sisyphean in its narrative, the stories are tight and enmesh the reader. Overall, the collection starts off strong with the first two stories an tapers off. To me its seems the later stories overly stress the theme of grinding down the main character and skimp on the little details that make the earlier stories more tangible.

Because of the unrelenting negativity thats present throughout this book, I agree with reviewer who advises it would be better to read only a story at a time and put the book down for a later date.

That's a little reductive, I know, but that's what I kept thinking while reading this great collection. Sometimes it's something akin to sci-fi, sometimes it's more like magic realism, but the stuff that goes on in these stories is always a refreshing departure from the norm of contemporary fiction. Lovers of Pynchon and David Foster Wallace should eat this up, but in some ways I felt, especially in this collection, that Saunders has more in common with Samuel Beckett. But here Sauders comments on the endurance of the human condition with civil war-era ghosts, morbidly obese office drones, post-apocalyptic mutants. I used to think this kind of subject matter would always be relegated to "guilty pleasures" status, but Saunders treats it with an intelligence absent in pulpier fare.

This short fiction is the best published in years. Readers of David Foster Wallace and Rick Moody will find much to enjoy here, but Saunders' fresh voice is all his own. His views on the near future are apocalyptic (of course, they would be), archly amusing, and (most surprising) humane. I especially enjoyed the title story, "The 400-Pound CEO," "Downtrodden Mary's Failed Campaign of Terror," and the novella "Bounty" (satire worthy of Voltaire). I can't wait to read more by this writer. This book is a genuine treat.

There are six short stories and a novella in this compilation. I only found Civicwarland and The 300 Pound CEO memorable and interesting. The other stories seemed to follow the formula too closely and with less success than my favorites: (1) an odd, sometimes funny business meant to be a parody of American consumerism (2) a lowly worker at this company who is miserable in life (3) A slow decline into meaninglessness (4) our narrator either tries to kill himself or simply thinks about killing himself.

Does this make for good literature? Yes and no. Yes, because the morbid comedy and hopelessness of his world does provoke some wonderful questions. No, because the questions are mostly disconnected from his characters, who I never related to.Maybe Saunders stories suffer from a similar problem to Flannery O'Connors classic tales, I never found myself rooting for the main characters. Everyone in Saunder's world is a whiney loser who blames the world (or God) for their problems. The world they live in is so surreal that I never can sympathize with them.

In his next compilation "Pastoralia," Saunders does a much better job creating characters you can relate to, but they mostly follow the above formula. (I recommend the short story "Sea Oak." This is his best short to date.) Can I blame him for following a formula? No. The formula is great and original. Can I keep reading story after story of the same formula? No.

Just get Pastoralia and read "Sea Oaks."

A first. I zipped through George Saunders stories and then immediately started over and repeated the act. It was the pure writing that was so compelling. These are tragic and bazaar tales but are nonetheless beautifully written. His crafting of sentences is pure art.
I read this collection immediately after finishing Raymond Carver's What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. My mind is ricocheting back and forth between the two, both masters of the same form but what different perspectives. I really enjoyed reading both of these back to back.
Also, back in 2001 a strange and twisted cartoon came and quietly went, The Oblongs. Mr. Saunders work made me pull out that wonderful DVD and play them all again.

the kind of book that makes reading a PLEASURE. mr saunders has an incredible immagination and writes clean direct prose, and (best of all) is not afraid (or is capable of) writing ENJOYABLE stories. so many authors (especially short stories writers) simply crap out pretentious writer workship type material without any story to tell at all. Such writing is simply empty ego (hidden under the delusion that the writer is being "important"). this wonderful author actually has stories to tell, on top of fantastic prose skills. one of the best short story collections i have ever read. thank you, mr. saunders.

An absolute home run of a collection. Every piece - with the exception of the novella - was a compressed work full of raw humanity. Humor laden, richly poignant, unabashedly down-to-earth. I cannot say enough good things about this book.

Remember the classic Brando line from On The Waterfront? ~~~~~I coulda been a contender~~~~~~~ George Saunders' CivilWarLand in Bad Decline brought those words to mind partially, but from a dramatically different source. Saunders' characters are all low-level functionaries with brilliant descriptive powers. Nearly a century ago, there was a low-level German official named Franz Kafka and if he were to read this book, he would say ~~~~~If I had had a sense of humor, I coulda been George Saunders~~~~~ CivilWarLand is a hilarious and lush tapestry of absurdist misery. The 21st century, where no one is enslaved by chains but all are wired together by the internet is in good hands with the likes of George Saunders. If you can't get this book tomorrow then buy it today!!

What makes these stories work is the voice. There is a clear authorial voice here, one which remains familiar without becoming grating. Occasionally the stories miss the mark ("The Wavemaker Falters") but mostly they're dead on. Saunders manages to convey a sense of melancholy and decay that's just perfect.
If you came to buy this collection after hearing "Offloading for Mrs Schwartz" on This American Life, hesitate no longer. Buy the book.

Sure, there are precursors to George Saunders-Kurt Vonnegut, Mark Twain, Nathaniel West, to name a few. However, I find his voice to be one of the most unique in American literature today. The stories are, for the most part, extremely funny. Yet there is a sense of darkness and despair to be found lurking in each of them, and then the ending of each story seems to cleanse the darkness and leave the reader refreshed. I'd hate to call a work of literature cathartic, but somehow I feel like the stories in "Civilwarland in Bad Decline" almost are cathartic in a way. The stories have deeper resonances, but never come across as difficult or pretentious. In the case of George Saunders, it appears, we have a natural story-teller.

An interesting debut collection. Most striking is Saunders's style - concise, terse, with wry humour and cleverly weighted comic dialogue. Some of these stories, especially the Novella, Bounty, tend to sag a little and come across as a little cliche hysterical realism, but there are also sections of fine comedy. Best of all, I reckon, is 'The 400 pound CEO' about an obese office gimp who ekes out a tragic existence in a nightmarish corporate scenario with a sadistic boss.

Saunders has something of a cult reputation. He deserves a larger audience.

Some people will not like this book. Some people will be turned off by the title, the first sentence, the typeset. And that's okay.

William Butler Yeats predicts in his poem, "The Second Coming," that "things fall apart; the center cannot hold" when the apocalypse occurs. As a writer, George Saunders proves that these now post-apocalyptic and dystopic fragments of what life once was are closer than our society likes to imagine. His gluing together of the chaotic remains of America into his stories is both hysterical and chilling. Saunders pays particular attention to the casual nuances of everyday life, yet manages to bring universal flaws of mankind to the table. In Civilwarland in Bad Decline, he explores the defecating depths of human travesty by highlighting society's biggest travesties as well as man's most trivial imperfections.

Saunders is obviously fascinated by American society, and portrays its dystopic cousin in such a way that he embellishes our culture's flaws while transporting the reader to a near-future or alternate present. Though not completely cohesive throughout all of the stories in Civilwarland in Bad Decline, Saunders' version of America is grossly distorted. In the novella "Bounty," he fashions a country ripped apart its seams by mutant slavery, overtaken by corporate America, and devoid of any compassion. Yet, amidst this abnormal alternative universe, Saunders incorporates pop culture references such as Dr. Pepper, Playboy, and even a McDonald's, though it has since been occupied by a religious cult.

Saunders seems to enjoy writing characters with heavily flawed personalities, but he especially excels at describing their physical defects, allowing the reader to pick up on the satire without the aid of blunt accusations. In the story "Bounty," he creates a mutant race of imperfect people known as the Flaweds. Each Flawed has his or her own special defect, such as "Mollie, a hag whose Flaw is a colossal turkeyneck," or "Buddy who was born with no teeth and Mike who has twice as many as he needs." Saunders expresses the irony man's cyclical discrimination, this time focusing on physical differences, rather than religious, sexual or intellectual differences. This can be attributed to a society obsessed with outer beauty, striving to obtain beauty over brains.

Saunders is not the type of writer who wants to detail every shred of nightfall over the course of two pages. In fact, in "The 400-Pound CEO," he does it in two sentences: "Big clouds roll in. Birds light on the Dumpster and feed on substances caked on the lid." His images are often vulgar, jarring and imaginative. Saunders uses the English language like one would use a sports car around a mountain, working with the bumps and sharp turns along the way.

Saunders' dystopias are usually tarnished and overtaken completely by corporations and businesses that are meant to sustain themselves, not their employees. After a crazed worker shoots a boy in "Civilwarland", the narrator rationalizes why he "decided to leave the police out of it because of the possible bad PR . . . and that's that." Even sex is commercialized, and due to its institutionalization, "a safeOrgy fills you with longing and repulses you at the same time."

Saunders is a master of the failed, pathetic Everyman, as one narrates each story in Civilwarland in Bad Decline. Saunders' characters are difficult to like, but easier to relate to than most would feel comfortable admitting. Uncovering the honesty and universal wishes in these miserable characters make them particularly moving. It is unsettling to realize that one shares the same ultimate desires as the heavily flawed characters in alternate universe of such disarray.

"Is this the life I envisioned for myself? My God no," one character admits. Obviously, dystopias are not meant for everyone. While Saunders' writing is fresh and quirky, his stories should not be taken lightly: They are the post-apocalyptic fragments of today's society, just waiting to cave in when the center finally gives.

This collection of short stories presents a strong and unique voice, wonderful composition, and a genuine sweetness missing in other "modern" works. There is a painful beauty expressed in the empty places explored here. The reader is reminded of his own humanity in an absence of emotion, a dose of existential angst, and the cold, barbaric nature of the world into which Saunder's characters are placed. This book is sad, funny and powerful, all at once. I read it regularly.

I got CIVILWARLAND in Bad Decline from a friend, and having never heard of Saunders before that I put off reading it for a few months. When I finally did on a week-long road trip, I was blown away. I sat in a campsite in Arizona and laughed out loud as I zoomed through all the stories in the book in most of an afternoon and evening.

Not much to say that hasn't been said here already, but if you like the work of Kurt Vonnegut, Tom Robbins and/or Douglas Adams, you MUST read Saunders work. Hilarious!

Short, sweet, funny, delightful satire. Absurd truth. Verisimilitude. An album of American folks, a picture of America. A quick read with hours of contemplation. The characters vivid. The story lives on the page. I want to make each story into an hour long episode of HBO TV. I imagine the actors playing each role. Each episode a different story. An instant hit!

Reader be warned: this book is incredibly dark. That being said, it's a fantastic read that isn't ugly, but definitely isn't supposed to be pretty. George Saunders is a master of setting the reader up for a happy ending, then crushing them instead. All of the short stories have a bleak tone to them, but aren't quite unbearable, but I found that the last few pages of every story puts you through the wringer. This book is definitely great for those who take their coffee (and everything else) black, and could also be great for any optimist who needs to be knocked down a few pegs.

Saunders kindly presents us with another collection of stories written with such incredible skill as to seem effortless. He further explores passivity and consumerism, and features more failing theme parks marketing specific American historical periods to gullible tourists. The novella, "Bounty", about a mutant's journey cross-country to save his sister, is brilliant, brilliant, brilliant.

These stories are not as overtly humorous as most of his others, but still just as enveloping and sharp. If you're not a bad person, you should be reading George Saunders' output. And loving it.

I think the reviewer (The NY Times, was it?) who described Saunders as the illegitimate offspring of Nathaniel West and Kurt Vonnegut, as much as I usually hate such analogies, hit the proverbial nail right on the head. Saunders' endearing sense of humor seems to me to be a cross of those two literary giants'. However, there is nothing derivative or hackneyed about this collection at all. In fact, I think he is the most original and interesting of literature's new voices. Though many of the stories share much in common, the collection is, as a whole, diverse and extremely enjoyable. Maybe even cathartic? I found "Civilwarland in Bad Decline" to be one of the most enjoyable collections I've read in years and I'd recommend it to anyone searching for something new from the world of literature.

I first read George Saunders in a 2005 issue of Harper's Magazine, and found that story, "Brad Carrigan, American" to be a refreshing, albeit somewhat cavalier absurdist satire of modern American life, underscored by a real moral imperative. Saunders is clearly much attuned to and deeply concerned about the ways in which our superficial consumer culture shadows its own inherent violence and spiritual impoverishment. Or something like that. These same concerns are also reflected in his earliest stories.

Published in 1996, Civilwarland is Saunders' first collection, featuring six stories and a novella. The stories are, for the most part, a disappointing series rehashing a similar theme. Each of the pieces in this collection is written in the first person and narrated in the same basic voice: male, passive, disempowered, usually impotent. In one story the narrator is apparently female, but the sense is the same. With one exception, all of the pieces involve a themed amusement park of some sort where the narrator is an employee, and in every instance the narrative is punctuated by several arbitrary acts of brutal violence. I found the repetitive hyperbolic satire of these stories to be obnoxious and over-blown, angry and frustrated without offering any real insight.

Through the working out of his one-trick thematic structure, Saunders seems to trying to get at something, and he finally achieves a measure of real craft in the collection's novella, "Bounty," which comprises half the book. This dystopian, tragicomic work of speculative fiction, set in a near future suffering the consequences of our moral and environmental destructiveness, echoes Margaret Atwood's masterful book Oryx and Crake. The novella, unlike the other pieces in Civilwarland, is actually engaging, a fairly well-developed and redeeming tale where Saunders' hilariously mangled corporate-correctness-speak shines. Still, with half the book a loss, it's difficult to recommend.

If I could communicate, as clearly as possible, the embodiment of a 'glowing review,' I would do it here. These days it seems almost anyone can write a decent sentence. There are so many MFA programs out there now, that it seems like more people write short stories than read them. Yet, to come across a talent as huge as George Saunders (by education an Engineer, by pure gift of God, a writer) is still something to behold. With so many good writers writing good stories made of good sentences, its kind of tough to stand out and write with true excellence and originality. But George Saunders does this. Oh, does he do this. You don't know the meaning of the word pathetic until you step into the heads of some of these characters. Granted, you will get the sneaking feeling that the same protagonist is being transported from place to place and story to story, with few changes, but Saunder's heroes (if we can call them that) are so pathetic, so pitiable, so 'downtrodden,' that you can read of their ridiculous plights repeatedly and still be surprised at how good it makes you feel to do so. The main reason for this is Saunder's killer prose; it's almost an invented dialect of the post-modern mind. The very phrasing makes you feel like you're being tickled. And there's the voyeuristic aspect concomitant with today's TV culture. It's just great fun to watch bad things happen to normal people. And even if the main characters are very similar, the supporting cast is always a riot, complete with beautifully idiotic dialogue and deadpan narration. But perhaps the most remarkable aspect of these ironic, self-mocking tales, is their undercurrent of sympathy and sensitivity. At the end of nearly every story, Saunders manages to change the tone faster than Jeff Gordon can go through the gearbox, and suddenly you find yourself disarmed by the recognition of your own cynicism and what it might prevent you from knowing.

'Civilwarland in Bad Decline' is a collection of half a dozen stories and a novella, some set in the near-future, the rest indefinitely contemporary - but all of them written from such an absorbingly odd perspective that they seem to originate in a parallel dimension a half step out of sync with our own. Exactly what it is that twists Mr. Saunders' prose out of joint is hard to define - sometimes it is small details and concepts thrown at the reader without definition (deciphered through context), and other times it is the singularly strange mindset and motivations of his secondary characters. This is also intensified by the author's tendency to give his protagonists unusual occupations, such as a water park wavemaker operator (The Wavemaker Falters), a raccoon exterminator (The 400-Pound CEO), and a Verisimilitude Inspector at a Civil War reenactment facility (Civilwarland in Bad Decline).

This last story is the first presented, and arguably the best. A yes-man to the director of a Civil War themed living museum conspires with his boss on the best way to rid the park of periodic intrusions by violent gangs who terrorize the paying customers. Eventually they find that one of the men on their current payroll had been involved in some questionable activities during his tour in Vietnam, and they approach him to solve their gang problems - to meet violence with violence - a tactic that involves some shady moral rationalizations. Combining quirky dry humor, magical realism, Tarentino-esque violence, an emasculated and morally paralyzed main character, and a satirical critique of modern America, 'Civilwarland' is part commentary on society and part comedic bleak nihilism. Good fun!

Unfortunately, Mr. Saunders repeats the relative merits of the opening tale in each of his successive stories. Although the setting changes drastically, each main character is too alike - suffering from unmanageable guilt, neutered and generally abandoned by their wives and love interests, forced to submit in humiliating ways to their male counterparts - and though the quality of Mr. Saunder's technique is consistently superior throughout, like most single author collections, this is not one that is enhanced by reading straight through. In fact, it would probably be best to separate each story by several months.

Another issue with the collection is that by the time I reached the last story, (the novella 'Bounty'), I started to suspect that Mr. Saunder's fascination with humiliating his main characters - mentally, physically and sexually - might be the author's way of venting his masochistic interests. The stories began to read like vehicles primarily designed to frolic within this specific arena, and while every aspect of human behavior is certainly open to literary examination, I began to have the uncomfortable feeling that this was masochism for masochism's sake, written under the disguise of social commentary.

All of this adds up to an uneven collection whose parts are vastly greater than the whole. Five stars for the story 'Civilwarland in Bad Decline', three overall.

dark but funny as hell. you will enjoy it if you like Franzen or Joshua Ferris. If you often say out loud, "I don't get it, what are they talking about?" when you watch movies or television then don't bother.

George Saunders'prose rolls of the page slick and swiftly. Every one of these stories contains a fantastic and highly original Idea and mixes near future sci fi with elements of magic realism as each main protaganist confronts an existential problem in an insane world. So why not five stars? Nabokov said that a great storyteller should be an 'enchanter'and who could disagree? Saunders' plots work, I found myself able to suspend disbelief and the humour made me laugh often, these pieces are very inventive and insightful into the American Condition. Unfortunately for me, they were not very involving. The problem lies with his style of narration, I found that his lack of description and slow moments had me turning the pages fast, but upon finishing these stories I was left amused yet uncaring and feeling as though I had not been engrossed or 'taken in' - not enchanted. The reason for this is as I have mentioned, that these stroies are all action akin to the novels of Chuck Palahniuk, they keep you turning the pages so fast but overall, the resrained and unelaborate senences lack mood and atmosphere, I found it hard to fully put myself in the shoes and minds of the characters and imagine what the characters were going through. The world they inhabited was only ever partly convincing. Another gripe is that when stripped to the core, they are all essentially the same character facing the same problem. I'm English and the problem may be that this clipped, terse and minimalist style of prose has not, thankfully, caught on over here. Less is not allways more - try some of the shorter works by writers such as Will Self, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Poe, Maupassant, Peter Carey, Ballard - to name but a few - and see what I mean.

These stories are simply amazing. They are filled with dark scenes and grim thoughts. One minute they will make you laugh and the next, your conscience will reprimand you for your laughter. They teach, they amuse, they sadden, they delight. Wow.
I recommend them to anyone who likes to think.

I really enjoyed this book, which is very much in the absurdist/satirical tradition of Donald Barthelme. Saunders's fiction, however, is easier to decode than Don B.'s, probably because Saunders performs his stories in the voices of very sympathetic, underdog first-person narrators. He shares Don B.'s gift for exposing the most ridiculous patterns in our cultural discourse, but he does so in the process of shaping deeply symbolic stories, as opposed to Barthelme's brilliant, jarring fragments. I am really looking forward to his next collection.

The cover copy blurbs tried to sell the book as a cross between Nathanael West and Kurt Vonnegut. This blurb lies. Like I said, the book show promise. The scenarios the author dreams up to place his characters in are interesting. What doesn't work is how the characters act and interact. Also, while interesting, some of the scenarios are also unrealistic. In both "The 400 pound CEO" and "Bounty," we are expected to think that the actions could be happening now. However, the characters actions and inner thoughts belie a naivety of how humans think and interact.

Saunders comes across as an intelligent but tin-eared writer who, I hope has developed from his tendencies. Another drawback is that he relies on dialogue for a good amount of exposition. This is tiring for the reader. I am frankly surprised at all the accolades he has gathered. If he has earned them, I am worried about the state of the short story in this country. These works come across as the output of a high level student writer, like my friend Andy Bolt.

If Saunders wants to get away from naturalistic writing, I understand. I also understand the urge to compare him to Vonnegut. In many of Vonnegut's works we see the same approach to writing as in this work by Saunders. Take reality and alter it a bit. This allows the writer to throw a light on something that he wants to expose or explore. Vonnegut does not get enough credit for the elegance and beauty of his prose because it is so simple and easy to digest. In my opinion, Saunders in this analogy is roughage that passes through.

Saunders is a writer that is working on a single theme, with singular energy. This is not a problem for a writer if he brings something fresh to the theme each time he tackles it. Saunders will sometimes do this, but more often than not, he fails. That is why some of the stories in this collection are brilliant, while others seem like derivatives of those moments of brilliance. Rather than bring us a fresh insight on the problems of fiction, Saunders seems content to simply reiterate. Saunders is the archetypical writer of magazine fiction: in between the slick covers of The New Yorker his work is a bold standout, but when you set his stories alongside each other in a volume, the record skips.

I initially discovered G. Saunders in the New Yorker via a short story entitled "The End of FIRPO in the World" -- taken from Pastoralia -- and became and instant fan. This is the first book of his short stories I bought, and shortly there after I also purchased Pastoralia, his second collection. Both are wonderfully written, dark and very funny without seeming repetitive or forced. His stories are some of the most original and fresh I've read by a contemporary author in a long while, and I've passed his books on to many friends.

Very few writers can succeed in being compassionate without being sentimental, hilarious without losing any emotional impact. Although Saunders overuses certain comic effects and can occasionally settle for simple cleverness, the best of these stories (The 400-Pound CEO, especially) are up there with the best tragicomedy ever written, with Beckett and Elkin. And they can actually succeed - outmoded as the idea of moral fiction is -in making you a little more humane.

The stories are more like variations on a theme: near future, backdrop of unexplained environmental disaster and collapsing social infrastructure, stories take place in bizarre disneyland operations (civilwarland being one of them, with a fake Erie canal), almost uniformly depressing. "The 300-lb CEO" and the novella "Bounty" are the most interesting works here; the rest of the stories read like warmups.

Four and a half stars. This is one of the funniest most tragic books I've ever read. To understand that comment you'll have to read the book. For those who have a bizarre (and perhaps black) sense of humor, you will not be disappointed

Just had the pleasure of reading Civilwarland a few months ago. I should have read it years ago. A critique of this wonderfully imaginative book seems superfluous, given all the other reviews here that are accurate in their portrayal of this book as a truly unique, even seminal, work. Inspired and funny, anyone awake enough to see through America's specious promises of equality and fairness will appreciate Saunders' offering.

The introduction is a little misleading in that it describes George Saunders's writing as a form of realism. Although Saunders is writing about very real and honest emotions, his subject matter and plot often seem to be set in alternate dimensions to our reality, which contributes to the fun of his stories. The book is a very enjoyable read, prompting many laugh-out-loud moments, but the humor is generally a bit dark and cynical.

Saunders is a storyteller. And his stories are rollicking rides through landscapes that are hometown familiar and otherworldly at the same time. The stories are dark, funny, deeply humane and wickedly critical of the artiface and avarice of societies real and contrived. His is an original American voice.

Emotional, funny, disturbing, reaffirming. This is his first collection but Saunders is already a full-blown writer. And the afterword describing his life up to the point of publishing was an unexpected bonus. Just buy it.

The stories were boring and terse. I think he was hitting the ... and making the ... up as he went along. The 400lb CEO was supposed to be the best story in the bunch and it was weak. I did not finish this book.