CivilWarLand in Bad Decline: Stories and a Novella

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George Saunders doesn’t need an introduction. He’s not a dead guy whose work was and remains difficult to read. He’s not toiling away in obscurity or translated from the Chamicuro. He’s the future of American short fiction and has been for about fifteen years. He publishes in The New Yorker like Cheever and Updike used to publish in The New Yorker. He has won a MacArthur grant and a Guggenheim fellowship, four National Magazine Awards, and even something called the World Fantasy Award. I bet Cheever and Updike never won the World Fantasy Award. The man himself has appeared on The Colbert Report and the Late Show with David Letterman. He’s practically a celebrity, and you don’t find many of those in the literary world these days.

Nevertheless, on May 24, 2012, at 3:07 P.M., I received an email from an editor at Random House that read, in part, “We’re publishing an ebook of CivilWarLand in Bad Decline in November (it exists only in paperback now)… [and] I wanted to ask if you would consider writing a short intro to it.” I happened to be online when the email came in, and without giving too much consideration to what I might say, or to the compositional challenges inherent even in a short introduction, I replied seven minutes later, at 3:14 P.M., unequivocally: “Done. Give me the due date. Totally psyched.”

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