Try our Advanced SearchShort stories by George Saunders
George Saunders is the author of eleven books, including Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the 2017 Man Booker Prize for best work of fiction in English, and was a finalist for the Golden Man Booker, in which one Booker winner was selected to represent each decade, from the fifty years since the Prize’s inception. The audiobook for Lincoln in the Bardo, which featured a cast of 166 actors, was the 2018 Audie Award for best audiobook.
His stories have appeared regularly in The New Yorker since 1992. The short story collection Tenth of December was a finalist for the National Book Award, and won the inaugural Folio Prize in 2013 (for the best work of fiction in English) and the Story Prize (best short story collection).
He has received MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships, the PEN/Malamud Prize for excellence in the short story, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2013, he was named one of the world’s 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine. In support of his work, he has appeared on The Colbert Report, Late Night with David Letterman, All Things Considered, and The Diane Rehm Show.
He was born in Amarillo, Texas and raised in Oak Forest, Illinois. He has a degree in Geophysics from the Colorado School of Mines and has worked as a geophysical prospector in Indonesia, a roofer in Chicago, a doorman in Beverly Hills, and a technical writer in Rochester, New York. He has taught, since 1997, in the Creative Writing Program at Syracuse University
Listing 30 stories.
After a trial injection of an experimental drug into a group of monkeys, an observer watches the various participants’ unusual and often deadly responses.
A man in suburbia finds his neighbor nearly naked standing outside his kids' rooms. He begins to retaliate to prevent it from ever happening again.
Al Roosten, a local business owner always second-best to his competitor, Larry Donfrey, contemplates returning to an anti-drug charity event to ensure that Donfrey is able to help his disabled daughter.
A group of kids in a Chicago neighborhood direct both spite and love at two old women who are not who they seem.
A man living on a TV show struggles to reconcile his privileged, wealthy lifestyle with the American-driven horrors occurring elsewhere in the world — especially when they begin to show up in his backyard.
A young man who went broke moves back to Chicago and lives in his aunt's basement. Meanwhile, he becomes a roofer where he is exposed to a spectrum of poverty, racism, and power among his colleagues.
A man working at a communications community wants a new job. His coworker promises him one, so long as the man helps to hide human body parts.
In a lab nicknamed "Spiderhead," experiments involving mind-altering drugs are run on convicted murderers. After he sleeps with two female prisoners, a male prisoner is forced to decide which woman he would like to give a pain-inducing drug.
A typical nice-guy colleague with a toxically positive attitude delivers an exhortation to his colleagues about eliminating self-doubt so as to increase work performance.
A traumatized veteran returns from the war and must navigate the changes he finds in his disoriented personal life, all while enduring superficial judgments from his family and community.