![]() US release cover | |
Author | George Saunders |
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Language | English |
Genre | Short story collection |
Publisher | Random House |
Publication date | January 8, 2013 |
Publication place | United States |
Media type | Print (hardcover) |
Pages | 208 |
ISBN | 0812993802 |
OCLC | 785558855 |
Tenth of December is a collection of short stories by American author George Saunders. It contains stories published in various magazines between 1995 and 2012. The book was published on January 8, 2013, by Random House. One of the stories, "Home", was a 2011 Bram Stoker Award finalist. [1] Tenth of December was selected as one of the 10 Best Books of 2013 by the editors of The New York Times Book Review . [2] The collection also won The Story Prize (2013) for short-story collections [3] and the inaugural Folio Prize (2014). [4] [5] [6] [7]
Story | Originally published in | Year |
---|---|---|
"Victory Lap" | The New Yorker | 2009 |
"Sticks" | Harper's Magazine | 1995 |
"Puppy" | The New Yorker | 2007 |
"Escape from Spiderhead" [8] | The New Yorker | 2010 |
"Exhortation" -- Originally published as part of "Four Institutional Monologues" | McSweeney's | 2000 |
"Al Roosten" | The New Yorker | 2009 |
"The Semplica Girl Diaries" | The New Yorker | 2012 |
"Home" | The New Yorker | 2011 |
"My Chivalric Fiasco" | Harper's | 2011 |
"Tenth of December" | The New Yorker | 2011 |
A young girl named Alison is kidnapped three days before her birthday. Kyle, a boy who lives nearby whose parents enforce very strict household rules, sees the event unfold and must decide whether to help Alison (who used to be his friend but stopped hanging out with him after becoming popular) or to ignore the situation to keep himself safe.
A father has a tall pole in the front yard that he constantly decorates for holidays. His child recounts life with his dad and how the man eventually lost his sanity after his wife died and began to decorate the pole in bizarre ways.
Two women, Callie and Marie, lead very different lives. Callie has a happy life with her husband, whom she loves. She has a son, Bo, who runs away and darts in between cars on the interstate. In order to keep him safe, she chains him to a tree like a dog in the backyard. She sees this as a way to keep him from escaping, because he loves it outside and hates it in the house. They have a very messy home and constantly adopt pets to sell. When they are not sold, her husband kills them, justifying it by explaining that he grew up on a farm, and animals dying was a constant part of life. Callie wants nothing more than to please him, so she accepts this behavior. Marie has a different life. She also has a son with behavioral problems, which she solves by keeping him glued to a handheld video game. Marie had a troubled childhood and was neglected by her mother. The two women meet when Marie arrives at Callie's house to buy a new puppy for her children. Marie's children beg her to adopt it, but after seeing Bo out the window chained to a tree, Marie decides against it and leaves abruptly. In order to protect her husband from having to kill the puppy, Callie later abandons it in a nearby cornfield to die.
Because he was convicted of a crime, Jeff has been sent to an experimental prison where inhabitants are guinea pigs for a man named Ray Abnesti, a sort of warden who develops pharmaceuticals. In an experiment to determine the strength of love, Abnesti puts Jeff in a room with a woman named Heather. Neither finds the other very attractive until a drug is administered and they suddenly fall deeply in love with each other and have sex. This continues until the drug stops being administered, when they suddenly lose all love for each other. The process is repeated with Jeff and a woman named Rachel. The next day, Abnesti brings both Heather and Rachel into a room and asks Jeff to decide which woman should be drugged with Darkenfloxx, a drug that causes extreme mental and physical distress. Jeff wants no one to be hurt, but has no preference as to which should endure the drug. Satisfied, Abnesti decides not to administer the drug. Later, Jeff finds himself in a room with another man whom he realizes also had sex with Rachel and Heather. He realizes that Abnesti is asking one of the women which one of the men should be given Darkenfloxx. The same result happens each time, and the drug is never administered.
Later, after Abnesti presents the love drug he is developing to his superiors, he says he must go into greater depth and gives Heather Darkenfloxx, saying that Jeff must say exactly what he feels while he watches Heather suffer in order to prove he has no romantic feelings for her. But the Darkenfloxx is so damaging that Heather commits suicide to escape the pain. When Abnesti reveals that he will do the same thing to Rachel to determine whether Jeff has a romantic attachment, Jeff refuses to participate. He insists that the drug should not be used. Abnesti leaves to get a warrant to administer drugs to Jeff that will force him to comply. To prevent Rachel from being tortured, Jeff administers Darkenfloxx to himself, and while under its influence kills himself. A voice tells him that his body is salvageable, and he can return to life, but Jeff declines, knowing he's had enough of life. Jeff's final emotion is happiness that, in the end, he did not kill and never would again.
A letter from a man named Todd, the boss of a group of men who do mysterious work in Room 6, encourages his staff to have a positive attitude about their work, which is never named but must be guessed by the reader.
Al, an unsuccessful antique store owner, is involved in a charity event in which he must dress up and walk down a runway in order to earn money. One of the competitors in the event is Larry Donfrey, a successful realtor for whom Al has very bitter and jealous feelings. He suppresses his hatred for Donfrey by making up elaborate schemes in his head in which the two become good friends and Al gains the respect he craves from the town.
The narrator, a middle-class father, living a safe but unfulfilling life, attempts to please his daughter Lilly and compete with a wealthier family by buying her various lavish gifts. These include Semplica Girls, women trafficked from third-world countries to be used as human lawn ornaments. His sensitive younger daughter Eva frees the Semplica Girls, a felony. The loss of the Semplica Girls puts the family in severe debt. In confronting the legal and financial hardships he now faces, the narrator learns of the more severe challenges faced by the Semplica Girls in their home countries.
A soldier named Mikey returns to live with his mother and has to learn to adapt to the new world.
Ted, a janitor, witnesses the rape of fellow employee Martha by Don Murray, the boss of the Medieval theme park where Ted works. Because both Martha and Don want to avoid embarrassment, Ted is given "hush money" in the form of a promotion: he is now a pacing guard. For his new job, he must take KnightLyfeⓇ, a drug that cause him to think, act, and speak like a chivalric knight. Because of his chivalry, he eventually reveals to others what happened to Martha. When Don learns of this, Ted is fired.
A lonely boy with heroic daydreams and a cancer patient seeking to die by suicide take a walk in the same woods.
Saunders has commented that he was inspired to write the title story, "Tenth of December," after beginning to wonder how he would handle "a slow and protracted death." That later led to the idea of a man planning to freeze to death, only to be interrupted during his efforts. [9]
The collection debuted at #3 on The New York Times Hardcover Fiction Bestselling List. [10] During the week of February 24, 2013, it reached #2 on that same list. [11]
Critical reception for the book has been highly positive, [12] with the Philadelphia City Paper stating that although the stories didn't have a sense of cohesiveness, "the stories seemed tied together at the brain, like the poor unfortunates in one of the best stories in December." [13] The List praised some of the stories in the book, but wrote that the "overall effect is rather insubstantial". [14] Kirkus Reviews and Booklist both gave the compilation a starred review, with Booklist writing that the set had "unpredictable, stealthily funny, and complexly affecting stories of ludicrousness, fear, and rescue". [15] [16] Entertainment Weekly gave the collection an A, saying that Saunders "is the master of joy bombs: little explosions of grin-stimulating genius that he buries throughout his deeply thoughtful, endlessly entertaining flights of imagination" and "offers an irresistible mix of humor and humanity." [17]
Reviewing the book for New York Journal of Books, Charles Holdefer wrote that it "shows the writer in excellent form and will surely rank as one of his best books to date. The opening story, "Victory Lap," is one of the strongest the author has ever written. Hilarious and alarming, it's a tale of children in extreme danger that manages to avoid the noxious clichés often accompanying the genre. It's also a technical marvel, compressing three distinct points of view and individual backstories into a very small space. The bold shifts of consciousness here positively sizzle." [18]
In a January 2013 cover story about the author, The New York Times Magazine called Tenth of December "The best book you'll read this year." [19] In 2019, The Guardian ranked it the 22nd best book since 2000. [20]
Tenth of December: Stories has been translated into Spanish by translator Ben Clark and published by Ediciones Alfabia in 2013.
The short story collection has been translated into Polish by translator of modern English language literature Michał Kłobukowski and published by W.A.B. in 2016.
The story "Escape from Spiderhead" was adapted as the film Spiderhead , directed by Joseph Kosinski and starring Chris Hemsworth, Miles Teller and Jurnee Smollett. It was released on Netflix in June 2022. [21] [22]
The New Yorker is an American magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. It was founded on February 21, 1925, by Harold Ross and his wife Jane Grant, a reporter for The New York Times. Together with entrepreneur Raoul H. Fleischmann, they established the F-R Publishing Company and set up the magazine's first office in Manhattan. Ross remained the editor until his death in 1951, shaping the magazine's editorial tone and standards.
David Foster Wallace was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and university professor of English and creative writing. Wallace's 1996 novel Infinite Jest was cited by Time magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005. His posthumous novel, The Pale King (2011), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2012. The Los Angeles Times's David Ulin called Wallace "one of the most influential and innovative writers of the last twenty years".
Thomas Coraghessan Boyle is an American novelist and short story writer. Since the mid-1970s, he has published nineteen novels and more than 150 short stories. He won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1988, for his third novel, World's End, which recounts 300 years in upstate New York.
Lorrie Moore is an American writer, critic, and essayist. She is best known for her short stories, some of which have won major awards. Since 1984, she has also taught creative writing.
Ben Marcus is an American author and professor at Columbia University. He has written four books of fiction. His stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in publications including Harper's, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Granta, The New York Times, GQ, Salon, McSweeney's, Time, and Conjunctions. He is also the fiction editor of The American Reader. His latest book, Notes From The Fog: Stories, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in August 2018.
Colm Tóibín is an Irish novelist, short story writer, essayist, journalist, critic, playwright and poet.
George Saunders is an American writer of short stories, essays, novellas, children's books, and novels. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, McSweeney's, and GQ. He also contributed a weekly column, "American Psyche", to The Guardian's weekend magazine between 2006 and 2008.
Benjamin S. Lerner is an American poet, novelist, essayist, and critic. The recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright, Guggenheim, and MacArthur Foundations, Lerner has been a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award in fiction, and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, among many other honors. Lerner teaches at Brooklyn College, where he was named a Distinguished Professor of English in 2016.
James Lasdun is an English novelist and poet.
Rachel Cusk is a British novelist and writer.
Mohsin Hamid is a British Pakistani novelist, writer and brand consultant. His novels are Moth Smoke (2000), The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013), Exit West (2017), and The Last White Man (2022).
Akhil Sharma is an Indian-American author and professor of creative writing. His first published novel An Obedient Father won the 2001 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. His second, Family Life, won the 2015 Folio Prize and 2016 International Dublin Literary Award.
Joshua Ferris is an American author best known for his debut 2007 novel Then We Came to the End. The book is a comedy about the American workplace, told in the first-person plural. It takes place in a fictitious Chicago ad agency experiencing a downturn at the end of the 1990s Internet boom.
Rachel Kushner is an American writer, known for her novels Telex from Cuba (2008), The Flamethrowers (2013), and The Mars Room (2018).
Pastoralia is short story writer George Saunders’s second full-length short story collection, published in 2000. The collection received highly positive reviews from book critics and was ranked the fifth-greatest book of the 2000s by literary magazine The Millions. The book consists of stories that appeared in The New Yorker; most of the stories were O. Henry Prize Stories. The collection was a New York Times Notable Book for 2001.
John Freeman is an American writer and a literary critic. He was the editor of the literary magazine Granta from 2009 until 2013, the former president of the National Book Critics Circle, and his writing has appeared in almost 200 English-language publications around the world, including The New York Times Book Review, the Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, and The Wall Street Journal. He is currently an executive editor at the publishing house Knopf.
TheWriters' Prize, previously known as the Rathbones Folio Prize, the Folio Prize and The Literature Prize, is a literary award that was sponsored by the London-based publisher The Folio Society for its first two years, 2014–2015. Starting in 2017, the sponsor was Rathbone Investment Management. At the 2023 award ceremony, it was announced that the prize was looking for new sponsorship as Rathbones would be ending their support. In November 2023, having failed to secure a replacement sponsor, the award's governing body announced its rebrand as The Writers' Prize.
Lincoln in the Bardo is a 2017 experimental novel by American writer George Saunders. It is Saunders's first full-length novel and was The New York Times hardcover fiction bestseller for the week of March 5, 2017.
Spiderhead is a 2022 American sci-fi psychological thriller film directed by Joseph Kosinski, with a screenplay by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, based on the dystopian short story "Escape from Spiderhead" by George Saunders and first published in The New Yorker. The film stars Chris Hemsworth, Miles Teller, and Jurnee Smollett. The story follows inmates in a luxurious prison who participate in experiments involving mind-altering drugs. Principal photography took place in Australia in 2020.
Liberation Day: Stories is a book of short stories by the American writer George Saunders. It collects stories published in various magazines between 2013 and 2022, along with a few new stories. The book was published October 18, 2022 by Random House.