Despite winning the National Magazine Award four times, having his short story collection named one of the NY Times ‘Ten Best” in 2013, and winning the Booker Prize for his first novel, Saunders has remained one of the lesser known of America’s great contemporary writers.  Perhaps this year’s Medal for Distinguished Contributions to American Literature awarded by the National Book Foundation will change that.

My guess is that Saunders’ comparatie lack of fame is due to the fact that since 1997 he has toiled at Syracuse University teaching creative writing, hardly a formula for fame and wealth.  It has, on the other hand, afforded him the time, security, and income to continue to turn out essays, novels, short stories, novellas and children’s books.

I loved his “Tenth of December: Stories” and “A Swim in a Pond in the Rain” essays, though I tried twice and couldn’t get into his Booker winning “Lincoln in the Bardo”.  Time to give it another try.

This book of essays written 18 years ago reads as if it were published yesterday.  His take on American democracy, the press, and the inequality that befouls our society is so current that it’s a bit unsettling that he saw this coming nearly two decades ago.  In commenting about our misadventure in Iraq, he writes that it was a failure of imagination saying, “A culture better at imagining richly, three-dimensionly, would have had a greater respect for war than we did, more awareness of the law of unintended consequences, more familiarity with the world’s tendency to throw aggressive energy back at the aggressor in ways he did not expect.  A culture capable of imagining complexly is a humble culture.”  Donald Trump are you listening???? He focuses on the Megaphone as the “composite of the hundreds of voices we hear each day that come to us from people we don’t know via high tech sources” and comments that it is “the ascendant component of that voice (which) has become bottom-dwelling, shrill, incurious, ranting, and agenda-driven”.  And he wrote that before Fox News, Trump, Project 25, et al.

Those passages are typical of this insightful, wise, but also often laugh-out-loud funny collection. Saunders visits Dubai, Nepal, Sumatra, Hay-on-Wey in Wales, and has great commentary on each. His characterization of the Brits in the voice of an ignorant American is terrific, and his exploration of Twain’s Huckleberry Finn anticipates Percival Everett’s “James” by 20 years.

In short, this is a terrific collection of essays written by one of our great commentators.  I think you’ll enjoy it from start to finish.