Tenth of December

Tenth of December is George Saunders's 2013 fourth story collection, the Story Prize winner and the work that established Saunders's broader American literary readership before Lincoln in the Bardo (2017, Man Booker Prize). The structural premise is ten stories of literary fantasy and contemporary American social satire that operate across the patient Saunders register that distinguishes his project from the broader contemporary American literary fantasy tradition (Karen Russell, Kelly Link, the broader 2000s-and-2010s American literary-fantasy ensemble). The title story ("Tenth of December") follows Don Eber, a brain-cancer-diagnosed middle-aged man, who has driven to a frozen Adirondack pond to end his life and who is interrupted by the eight-year-old boy Robin who has been playing alone at the pond. The collection rotates ten distinct conceits across the entire volume, including "Escape from Spiderhead" (the corporate-pharmaceutical-research dystopia that became the 2022 Joseph Kosinski Netflix Chris Hemsworth film), "Victory Lap" (the suburban-American-adolescent first-person narration across an attempted abduction), and "The Semplica Girl Diaries" (the suburban-American-corporate-late-capitalism dystopia in which Third-World women hung on lawn-decoration wires are the structural status symbol of suburban American middle-class life).

Saunders's structural method is the patient short-story construction across the ten stories, with the broader Saunders-comic-tragic register operating in the patient close-third-person omniscient mode Saunders has been refining across the broader catalog (CivilWarLand in Bad Decline 1996, Pastoralia 2000, In Persuasion Nation 2006). The collection earned the New York Times Best Book of the Year 2013 designation, the Story Prize, and the Folio Prize 2014, and is structurally the canonical contemporary American literary short-story collection of the 2010s. The novel's structural argument (about how the operational mechanics of contemporary American late-capitalist suburban-and-corporate routine produce specific kinds of imaginative-and-moral collapse that the broader contemporary American literary tradition has not historically committed to at this scale) is made through the texture of the ten stories rather than through any direct argument.

Recommended as required contemporary American literary fiction reading, as the right Saunders entry point alongside Liberation Day (2022, story collection) and Lincoln in the Bardo (2017), and for fans of Karen Russell, Kelly Link, and the broader contemporary American literary-fantasy short-story tradition. The David Sedaris / Will Patton / George Saunders / Lorelei King / Andre Braugher full-cast audiobook is the definitive audio production. Five stars without reservation.