• Anshuma Jain
• Dr Richa Pathak

George Saunders (born December 2, 1958) is an American writer of short stories, essays, novellas, children’s books, and novels. Saunders is a great writer, and part of the greatness is that reading him feels very much like being spoken to kindly. This might be why some people wrote to add their observations to his readings of the stories .He is a great comic chronicler of the hours spent in highly stratified and compulsively monitored workplaces. Too often “beyond broke,” his (usually male) protagonists endure all manner of emotional and physical humiliations in order to pay their bills. George Saunders has published more than twenty short stories and numerous Shouts & Murmurs in The New Yorker since first appearing in the magazine, in 1992. His work includes the short-story collections “Civil War Land in Bad Decline” (a finalist for the 1996 PEN/Hemingway Award), “Pastoralia,” “In Persuasion Nation” (a finalist for the Story Prize), “Tenth of December” (a finalist for the National Book Award and the recipient of the Rathbones Folio Prize), “ and many more. The 10 stories in Tenth of December, by George Saunders, are all about people. No matter how weird the setting – a futuristic prison lab, a middle-class home where human lawn ornaments are a great status symbol –Pastoralia’ is nearly seventy pages long, allowing Saunders to expand his cast of characters. We get to meet Bradley, Janet’s hideous son, who turns up to threaten her with his future, swearing that he will begin ‘inadvertently misusing substances’ again if she doesn’t lend him money. We meet, by fax, Greg Nordstrom, who is under pressure to begin the Staff Remixing, and who needs our caveman to betray Janet. We also meet Marty and Jeannine, who have been Remixed out of their jobs running the Employees Only shop. Saunders’s stories are always about humanity and the meaning we find in small moments, in objects or gestures. He paints painful portraits of domesticity, of families, of death. It could be described as melancholically happy, each story full of little truths that make us both amused and very uneasy. The American writer also believes that fiction could become a tool to motivate readers to be bold and act with purpose in these troubled times. Short stories should be “ruthlessly efficient,” with constantly escalating dramatic tension and an airtight logic of causation, writes Saunders. The more compressed, the better. “In engineering, you’re always looking for the simplest explanation,” he says. He uses the same mental muscles when it comes to analyzing and revising short stories. “It’s not exactly logical, but it is causal. “

short stories, comic chronical, domesticity, dramatic tension, motivation

"A Comparative Study of George Saunders’ Stories with special reference to optimism", International Journal of Emerging Technologies and Innovative Research (www.jetir.org), ISSN:2349-5162, Vol.9, Issue 12, page no.b840-b843, December-2022, Available :http://www.jetir.org/papers/JETIR2212196.pdf

"A Comparative Study of George Saunders’ Stories with special reference to optimism", International Journal of Emerging Technologies and Innovative Research (www.jetir.org | UGC and issn Approved), ISSN:2349-5162, Vol.9, Issue 12, page no. ppb840-b843, December-2022, Available at : http://www.jetir.org/papers/JETIR2212196.pdf