The connections between us...

...George Saunders: 'A story is a really weird art object that should contain life but not be enslaved by banality'

The stories in Tenth of December, like those in his previous collections, certainly are "weird art objects"; they take the familiar situations and backdrops of everyday American life and saturate them with hyper-real colour and skewwhiff language. "Soon," as a character in the fantastical story "Escape from Spiderhead" says, having been drip-fed the lucidity-inducing drug Verbaluce, "I was feeling the same things but saying them better." Sometimes his trick is to imagine not a dystopia, but a utopia – to convincingly effect, for example, a child abduction that ends with a rescue, or, as in the collection's title story, an aborted suicide. Throughout, what he tries to create is "a non-condescending space, where I'm not imagining you as being less than me, I'm not going to show off for you, I'm going to imagine you as equal to me, maybe even a little better than me. Then we start talking like equals."