Neoliberalism and cruelty are the twin devils in Saunders's universe, according to most of the scholars represented in this collection. His stories about theme parks in decline and other dystopian symbols of contemporary life are accompanied by tortured and euphemistic language and are represented in refreshingly bizarre forms. An excellent satirist, Saunders is often compared to Vonnegut, Barthelme, and sometimes Orwell. The essays all acknowledge the intrusions of the marketplace into the interior of characters’ lives, and each of the authors varies nicely in assessments of the possibilities of resistance and how to read Saunders's emphasis on kindness, empathy, and the redemptive possibilities of the imagination.

Exploited workers are often central to the stories. In her contribution, Kasia Boddy notes that Saunders focusses on workers who are broke, work long hours, and are extremely vulnerable in times of economic downturn. Boddy also takes up the “work of kindness” and “working with language.” Recognizing a balance between dystopian work conditions and occasional eruptions of kindness, Boddy skillfully weaves scholarship on American labour into careful readings of Saunders's stories. Coming to a similar conclusion through a different set of readings, Clare Hayes-Brady connects many of Saunders's short stories about underdogs and losers. Her essay is especially thorough in its reading of The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, a 2006 novella that “in the age of President Trump … seems downright prophetic” (26). Developing the ways in which a slide towards authoritarianism could happen in America, Richard E. Lee's essay takes up the logic of the sequence in the case of four stories that were originally published in an issue of McSweeney's in the year 2000. Lee's main point is that we should take the logic of this neglected short-story sequence seriously, and to do this Lee usefully reviews distinctions between the short-story “cycle” and “sequence.” This particular sequence, Lee argues, is an answer to a rhetorical question Saunders asks in an interview with Lee: “What would genocide look like in the United States?” (80).

Adam Kelly's piece offers another good review of this author's “scathing satire of corporate jargon” (41), but Kelly addresses the balance between satire and sincerity: “His characters attempt to mean what they say and do even with the debased resources offered to them by a language they cannot master” (43). Kelly offers an especially good reading of Saunders's most-discussed story, “Escape from Spiderhead.” Gillian Elizabeth Moore focusses on later work in her contribution, contrasting the treatment of hope in “Bounty” from Saunders's first story collection in 1996 and “The Semplica Girl Diaries.” While “hope often seems a self-defeating strategy that plays straight into the corporate ethos of self-improvement” (68), “Organized forms of social resistance are specifically satirized” (69).

David Huebert, drawing on the discourse of animal studies, takes the dystopian approach in another direction in his essay, which again recognizes the critique of exploitative economic practices and corporate euphemism alongside a satirical treatment of theme park simulacra. The essay connects a wide set of topical and technical issues and opens up “otherness” in interesting ways. Essays by Dana Del George and Michael Trussler take up the appearance of ghosts and zombies. Del George sees the return of magical realism in encounters between the artificial and the supernatural: “Saunders gives voice to souls lost among simulacra and offers resistance to the bewildering and dehumanizing forces of late capitalism” (121), while Trussler examines the way the living dead make manifest ethical demands implicit in the suffering of others. According to Trussler, Saunders's stories reveal the nihilism rampant in contemporary culture. Aidan Cottrell-Boyce's essay posits “the presence of the hidden God in stories by George Saunders” (138). What's missing is central. Oddly, Saunders's own interest in Buddhism is never mentioned.

Kindness is a critical commonplace. Michael Basseler's essay reviews the narratological engagement with empathy and literary technique. “The Falls” and “Victory Lap” alternate points of view rapidly to foreground contrasts between identification with another suffering being, self-centered calculation, and cruelty. For Basseler, “narrative empathy and satire/irony may seem to be strange bedfellows or even mutually exclusive rhetorical strategies” (166). Jurrit Daalder presents the author as a cruel God who kicks his universe around mercilessly, comparing the author of “Escape from Spiderhead” to the uncompassionate subjects of the Milgram experiment. I disagree with the conclusions, but the essay is punchy.

Two essays towards the end of the volume provide distinct encounters with psychological interiority. Steve Gronert Ellerhoff's essay on “The Semplica Girl Diaries” recalls that the story had its genesis in a dream, Saunders reports, in which the author enjoyed the experience of viewing beautiful Third World women strung up with wires through their brains in to beautify one's lawn. Ellerhoff considers this enjoyment as more of an ethical quandary than have other readers, who have generally recognized moral critique in the satire. Robert Cameron Wilson's essay on “Victory Lap” offers a Bakhtinian approach to the polyvocality of interior monologues. In this story three characters – a flighty young girl, a brutish man who plans to rape her, and the geeky boy next door – interact in a way that smashes the details of quotidian life against the rocks of traumatic violence. In the interior monologue of the unlikely rescuer, we also hear the voice of his father, a bit of a control freak, who structures his son's life with Pavlovian punishments and rewards. While brutality and naivety are topics of the story, the narrative arc again inclines toward kindness.

The collection is an invaluable resource for those interested in the writings of Saunders and contemporary American fiction more generally. In addition to the introductory preface and the thirteen essays, the volume includes an especially useful bibliography of works by and about Saunders, as well as an interview with the author. Anyone wanting to write about or teach the work of George Saunders will want to access this collection.