Saunders, George - Tenth of December: Stories

Tenth of December: Stories – George Saunders

George Saunders's "Tenth of December: Stories" is a collection of eleven short stories (covering a fairly long time, from 1995 to 2009) characterized by an unconventional narrative style. The book was published in 2013.
The main topics covered are:
- the reduction of human experience to the sum of its feelings, the protagonists, in fact, are not defined by what they think, but only by what they feel. This is brought to the fore in the stories of "Escape from the Armor" and "The Simplified Girls" (in which some immigrant women are reduced to garden ornaments);
- The terror of the American middle class to be more like the poor class than the rich class. This fear affects both the economic and the identity factors.
- The influence of multinationals on the lives of individuals, who are held in a state of anxiety hour now of exaltation, based on how they relate to companies.
In this collection of tales, sometimes dystopia and realism melt together forming a caustic mixture, the unpleasant smell of a possible reality, perhaps already quietly in progress.
The thoughts of an overweight child and of an old Alzeihmer's ill-fated survivor who stumbles on words and snow alternate with their own burden of suffering, while their existences intertwine becoming unexpectedly a vital force.