George Saundersane Arroyo
Fiction

George Saunders is the author of three collections of short stories: the bestselling Pastoralia; CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, a Finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award; and In Persuasion Nation, a finalist for the 2006 STORY Prize for best short story collection of the year. Pastoralia and CivilWarLand in Bad Decline were both New York Times Notable Books. Saunders is also the author of the novella-length illustrated fable, The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, and the New York Times bestselling children's book, The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip. His most recent book is a collection of essays, The Braindead Megaphone, which received critical acclaim and landed him spots on The Charlie Rose Show, Late Night with David Letterman, and The Colbert Report. Vanity Fair wrote of the book, “Saunders’s bitingly clever and compassionate essays are a Mark Twain-syle shot in the arm for Americans, an antidote to the dumbing down virus plaguing our country.” Saunders’s work appears regularly in The New Yorker, GQ, and Harpers Magazine, and has appeared in several notable anthologies. In 2006, he was awarded both a MacArthur Fellowship, for "bring[ing] to contemporary American fiction a sense of humor, pathos, and literary style all his own," and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Syracuse University.