John Dugdale
Micro-Societies
The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil and In Persuasion Nation
By George Saunders
Bloomsbury 358pp £10.99 order from our bookshop
George Saunders’s most impressive story remains ‘Pastoralia’, which lent its title to his second collection. Its protagonist is the male half of a Stone Age couple in a Disney-style theme park; finding this full-time role frustrating, he jeopardises his livelihood by increasingly reckless breaches of the park management’s code for actors. This establishes the template for much of the American author’s subsequent output: an imagined micro-society with inscrutably perverse laws which are nevertheless docilely obeyed by the overwhelming majority, and an individual or group daring not to conform.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Sabotage became so prevalent that bankers even created their own terms – ‘asymmetric information’, ‘lack of financial literacy’, ‘the principal-agent dilemma’ – to describe how they might turn a dime from customers’ gullibility or ignorance.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/master-criminals-of-the-universe
'Unlike much that was extracted from India, these paintings were not plunder, and those who created them were properly remunerated and often received due credit.'
@PParkerWriting on 'Forgotten Masters: Indian Painting for the East India Company'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/artists-for-hire
‘"I feel", Lowell told Hardwick ... "as if I were pulled apart and thinning into mist, or rather being torn apart and still preferring that state to making a decision."'
Richard Davenport-Hines on the letters of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/yours-unfaithfully-2