Released April 20, 2006.

For more info, visit Riverhead's web site for the book here.

Table of contents:

"I CAN SPEAK!"

"My Flamboyant Grandson"

"Jon"

"My Amendment"

"The Red Bow"

"Christmas"

"Adams"

"93990"

"Brad Carrigan, American"

"In Persuasion Nation"

"Bohemians"

"CommComm"

How terribly, awfully funny

"In Persuasion Nation," a collection of mordant stories by George Saunders, reveals an absurd world all too close to our own.

Kristin Tillotson, Minneapolis Star Tribune

A George Saunders collection is best read piecemeal. Unless cut with more soothing fare, his stories are so imaginative, so wickedly diverting that the undertow takes you before you even feel a chill. In Saunders' world, life is a reality television show, advertising slogans replace reasoning skills and mind-control devices are cheerfully absorbed as the way things are, and ought to be. Everything's hunky-dory, as long as the Dermafil camouflaging that drill hole at your hairline is packed in tight and you get your daily dose of Aurabon (a brand name certainly not meant to denigrate a certain addictive cinnamon shopping-mall snack).

In "In Persuasion Nation," his latest anthology, he keeps you off guard by punctuating macabre or sinister events with lighthearted mischief and the occasional word play ( a "dorkened" brow). The beginning of "My Flamboyant Grandson," for example, might seem to the uninitiated to be about an old man coming to grips with the fact that his grandkid is gay. But no, the Saunders enthusiast will wait for the real payoff: in this case an attempt to escape government-enforced shopping along a futuristic Broadway where computerized strips in people's shoes bring on aggressive sales pitches from each store window.

Saunders has been likened to other great American social satirists -- Nathanael West, Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon -- and it's a valid comparison in terms of effect. But he is definitely a voice of his own time, keeping up with the heaving cultural tide.

There's also something uniquely unsettling about the matter-of-fact way his plots unfold. It's as if he's a gremlin lurking in the shadows of the star chambers where real-life corporate marketing strategies are plotted, and is simply and sincerely relaying the facts as he observes them, despite the smirk we think we see. No doubt trying to attract new fans who might be turned off by such reviewer descriptives as "dark and demented," the promo palaver calls Saunders "beloved" and "consoling" and claims that this book shows "a new kind of empathy" in his work. Hardly -- it's always been there. Nothing but a burning love for humanity could drive someone to the bizarre lengths to which he goes. He is a resistance fighter on the front lines of the war on independent thought, battling those who would numb our minds for profit.

In "Brad Carrigan, American," he condenses the collective horrors of reality television into one paragraph: On "FinalTwist" five college friends take a sixth to an expensive Italian restaurant, supposedly to introduce him to a hot girl, actually to break the news that his mother is dead. This is the InitialTwist. During dessert they are told that, in fact, all of their mothers are dead. This is the SecondTwist. The ThirdTwist is, not only are all their mothers dead, the show paid to have them killed, and the fourth and FinalTwist is, the kids have just eaten their own grilled mothers.