Publication Date
January 2008
Abstract
When George Saunders’s first collection of short stories, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, came out in 1996 reviewers emphasized the surrealism of his fictional world of run-down theme parks and virtual-reality franchise businesses: "… a nightmarish post-apocalyptic world that might have been envisioned by Walt Disney on acid," wrote the Philadelphia Inquirer, while Newsweek called it "a cybernetic, postapocalyptic dystopia."