The realism of harsh everyday life shakes hands with dystopian science fiction, but always, in the darkness, a small light shines—a candle. Saunders places his crumpled optimism in the cracks, in the overgrown chasms, in the intervals where the blade of hope can shine.
The stories in The Tenth of December are black-and-white photographs, printed on aluminium; they are monophonic recordings that seek not so much to warn as to suggest that love remains paramount, that tenderness is neither outdated nor anachronistic. Amidst the darkness there are glimmers of light; a small candle offers warmth; a single phrase and a smile can turn things around.
- Pages: 264
- ISBN: 978-960-572-059-9
- Publication: 2015
- Dimensions: 14 x 21
- Categories: Literature, Books, Foreign Literature
What ultimately links the ten seemingly unconnected short stories by George Saunders in his book ‘December 10th’ (published by Ikaros) is, first and foremost, the sensation they evoke upon reading. Addictive, delightful, and at times not so easy to digest, they are not suited to casual reading.
– Marilena AstrapellouA distinctive writer, with a subversive approach to syntax and a recognisable style, George Saunders tackles a diverse range of themes in his short story collection ‘The Tenth of December’
– Nikos Xenios, bookpress.gr"...The Tenth of December is a collection of short stories that thrilled me and put me in the mood to stick with the short form..."
– Chania News..."The Tenth of December is a collection of short stories that thrilled me and put me in the mood to stick with the short form..."
– NO14ME"...An experiment that has met with huge acclaim in major literary journals abroad and which often yields exceptional literature or provides even the most conventional literature with tools and approaches that revitalise prose and fiction. For this reason, this book is well worth reading. It is an intelligent person’s view of our everyday lives, told with imagination and humour."
– Panagiotis Krokidas, Tetarto PressGeorge Saunders’ gentle literature is expansive. It distils the darkness of the world and makes it more bearable. When ‘The Tenth of December’ was published in January 2013 (now also available in Greek from Ikaros Publications in a highly inventive translation by Giorgos-Ikaros Babasakis), The New York Times Magazine dedicated its cover and many pages to the author because, quite simply, ‘George Saunders has written the best book you will read this year’. In 2014, his book also won the first international Folio Prize.
– Grigoris Bekos, To Vima"...Saunders’ short stories, deeply human and imbued with a profound humanism beneath their humorous surface, penetrate the reader’s psyche, lingering in the mind long after reading. Some of them are real gems, and the situations he describes may bring to mind the tales of everyday absurdity by Flannery O’Connor, the compelling stories of the great Raymond Carver, but they also have something of Vonnegut’s dark future about them...”
– Librofilo, Librofilo.blogspot.gr"...The author, without bias, records what he sees around him: on the one hand, the gloom of today’s America, but also of the whole world; and on the other, the solitary individual and all the opposing forces waging a relentless battle within him. That is why, under these circumstances, through a play of light and shadow, Saunders’s texts are not disparate but harmonious; they are not the product of the identification of similitudes, but of the union of opposites, hence their harmony."
– Petros Fournaris, Periou.grGeorge Saunders
George Saunders has written eight books, including the short story collections Twelfth of December (Folio Prize 2014) and Pastoralia. He has been a fellow of the Lannan Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Guggenheim Foundation. In 2006, he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. In 2013, he received the PEN/Malamud Short Story Award and was included in Time magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people in the world. His first novel, Oblivion and Lincoln, won the 2017 Man Booker Prize. He teaches on the Creative Writing Programme at Syracuse University.
