George Saunders’ new short-story collection has been hailed as The One Book You Must Read This Year. It’s “Tenth of December,” a title its writer insists has no significance whatsoever. “The truth is, I just loved the sound of it,” says Saunders, who teaches at Syracuse University and is often published in The New Yorker. “I always look for a random thing that sounds beautiful.” His sci-fi-tinged, class-conscious stories suggest the compassionate love child of Kurt Vonnegut and Raymond Carver. Some began in dreams. You’ll learn more Tuesday, when Dick Cavett, whom Saunders calls his childhood hero (“I learned how to be a person from him”) interviews him at the New York Public Library. Here’s what’s in Saunders’ own library.
The Stench of Honolulu
by Jack Handey
I humiliated myself in the Pump Room restaurant by laughing out loud reading the galley [book’s out July 16]. Jack Handey is the funniest writer in America. And his funny is a particular, sublime kind of funny — it builds and builds and is related to his supreme control of language. Read this book. You’ll feel better.
Europeana
by Patrik Ourednik
Ourednik retells the 20th century and turns it on its head. Is it a novel? Is it entirely composed of facts? Yes and yes. So we learn that “in 1910, the Americans devised a Eugenics Board [and] a list of socially unacceptable citizens who should be sterilized [including] homosexuals and syphilitics and alcoholics.” Who knew? The good old days? Maybe not so great.
The Flame Alphabet
by Ben Marcus
In this novel, set slightly in the future, language is killing us, especially the language emitted by children. Marcus takes this idea and explodes it, in sentences so strange and unique that an entire world gets built before your eyes. Marcus can’t seem to write an unoriginal or unthrilling book.
Senselessness
by Horacio Castellanos Moya
Moya, a Salvadoran writer now living in the US, has that rare ability to write novels that are fast and full — they feel huge but are also beautifully and dramatically shaped. This one has a stunning ending that sends you back to the beginning of the book, dazzled by his virtuosity and vision. It’s tough, sexual, violent and funny.