George Saunders on Letterman – that’s right, George Saunders on the Late Show with David Letterman!
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“Some
novelists seem to make great reporters. Two of the best
journalists of the last 50 years are Norman Mailer and
David Foster Wallace; their literary nonfiction is jaw-droppingly
good, the equal of their fiction. Maybe it's time to
add noted short-story writer George Saunders to this
short list. In The Braindead Megaphone, his
collection of funny essays and long journalism, the affable
author patrols the Mexican border, visits the Buddha
Boy in Nepal, and, in the title essay, ribs America's
loudmouth TV culture: 'Is all our media stupid? Far from
it. But: Is some of our media very stupid? Hoo boy.'
Is Saunders' book on target? Hoo boy. [Grade:] A.”
Entertainment Weekly
“Now hear this. Even though MacArthur-Foundation 100-Percent-Certified Grade-A Genius George Saunders’s first nonfiction collection, The Braindead Megaphone (Riverhead), is more rooted in the cultural terra firma of reality than his surreal and absurdly funny fiction, essays such as his account of chilling in the jungle with “the Buddha Boy” of Nepal, and the satirical manifesto of P.R.K.A. -- “People Reluctant to Kill for an Abstraction” -- still straddle the line between ridiculous and deadly serious, like a Girl Scout with a piece of spaghetti hanging out of her mouth, holding her troop hostage with an Uzi. 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. Well, we live in hope.”
Vanity Fair
“Sparkling.... Sends up a powerful warning flag about what the shouters and screamers of our contemporary mediascape are doing to American culture.”
Cleveland Plain Dealer
“You’ll find the work of George Saunders frequently described as ‘funny,’ but that's like calling a nuclear detonation warm - it’s true, abundantly so, but it fails to accurately convey the forces unleashed... The Braindead Megaphone is a collection of essays, not short stories, but it’s still a representative and very welcome addition to the Saunders canon. That’s because essay is given the loosest possible definition, embracing everything from lighthearted, wholly fictional verbal badinage to earnest, in-depth field reportage, and in every case the author’s trademark bricolage of the fantastical and the familiar is very much in evidence.”
San Francisco Chronicle
“Simultaneously hilarious and heartbreaking.”
Boston Globe
“A fun and thought-provoking read.”
kottke.org
“Short-story master George Saunders has perfected a form that we're gonna go ahead and call hysterical empathy: stories in which the regular guy, thrust into ever more cruel and absurd situations, endures. The essays in The Braindead Megaphone pack the same punch as his fiction. "Humor is what happens when we're told the truth quicker and more directly than we're used to," Saunders writes in a tribute to his forebear Kurt Vonnegut. He brings that perceptive humor to bear on Iraq-era media, Dubai's architecture, Borat, and more.”
New York Magazine
“Again and again, Saunders demonstrates that wacky , subversive, formally strange writing is not only contrary to our nation's capitalist spirit, it's the most natural and effective of responses to it. He makes the all-but-impossible look effortless. We're lucky to have him.”
Jonathan Franzen
“Not since Twain has America produced a satirist this funny.”
Zadie Smith
“George Saunders is so funny and inventive he loves words and so wide-eyed wistful he talks you into loving people.”
Sarah Vowell
Entertainment Weekly
“Now hear this. Even though MacArthur-Foundation 100-Percent-Certified Grade-A Genius George Saunders’s first nonfiction collection, The Braindead Megaphone (Riverhead), is more rooted in the cultural terra firma of reality than his surreal and absurdly funny fiction, essays such as his account of chilling in the jungle with “the Buddha Boy” of Nepal, and the satirical manifesto of P.R.K.A. -- “People Reluctant to Kill for an Abstraction” -- still straddle the line between ridiculous and deadly serious, like a Girl Scout with a piece of spaghetti hanging out of her mouth, holding her troop hostage with an Uzi. 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. Well, we live in hope.”
Vanity Fair
“Sparkling.... Sends up a powerful warning flag about what the shouters and screamers of our contemporary mediascape are doing to American culture.”
Cleveland Plain Dealer
“You’ll find the work of George Saunders frequently described as ‘funny,’ but that's like calling a nuclear detonation warm - it’s true, abundantly so, but it fails to accurately convey the forces unleashed... The Braindead Megaphone is a collection of essays, not short stories, but it’s still a representative and very welcome addition to the Saunders canon. That’s because essay is given the loosest possible definition, embracing everything from lighthearted, wholly fictional verbal badinage to earnest, in-depth field reportage, and in every case the author’s trademark bricolage of the fantastical and the familiar is very much in evidence.”
San Francisco Chronicle
“Simultaneously hilarious and heartbreaking.”
Boston Globe
“A fun and thought-provoking read.”
kottke.org
“Short-story master George Saunders has perfected a form that we're gonna go ahead and call hysterical empathy: stories in which the regular guy, thrust into ever more cruel and absurd situations, endures. The essays in The Braindead Megaphone pack the same punch as his fiction. "Humor is what happens when we're told the truth quicker and more directly than we're used to," Saunders writes in a tribute to his forebear Kurt Vonnegut. He brings that perceptive humor to bear on Iraq-era media, Dubai's architecture, Borat, and more.”
New York Magazine
“Again and again, Saunders demonstrates that wacky , subversive, formally strange writing is not only contrary to our nation's capitalist spirit, it's the most natural and effective of responses to it. He makes the all-but-impossible look effortless. We're lucky to have him.”
Jonathan Franzen
“Not since Twain has America produced a satirist this funny.”
Zadie Smith
“George Saunders is so funny and inventive he loves words and so wide-eyed wistful he talks you into loving people.”
Sarah Vowell
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