These stories, told in a voice that is at once witty, melancholy, and bravely honest, paint a tableau of lovers and family, of loss and pleasure, desire and memory. From the young secretary who by day hopes someone will notice her Phi Beta Kappa key and by night makes love to a married man she met at a Florsheim shoe store, to the shattering of a marriage by the shores of a tranquil lake, Self-Help is a unique, enduring work of short fiction.

A short story collection follows the fortunes of a diverse group of characters on singularly American pilgrimages, including an East Coast girl who dares a cowboy to whisk her away to the Rocky Mountains.

If Americans in the future were to try to send us a message about where our culture is heading, they might simply point to the fiction of George Saunders. Living in a world that's both indelibly original and hauntingly familiar, the characters in these stories bring to life our most absurd tendencies, and allow us to see ourselves in a shocking, uproariously funny new light. Here you find people who live and work in a simulated, theme-park cave and...

Collects nine stories written between 1979 and 2011 that chronicle three decades of American life from the perspective of a range of characters, including a pair of nuns in the South Bronx and two astronauts orbiting the Earth.

The Throwback Special is the story of twenty-two ordinary guys who gather each fall to reenact what ESPN has called the most shocking play in NFL history: the November 1985 play in which Joe Theismann of the Washington Redskins had his leg horribly broken by Lawrence Taylor of the New York Giants on Monday Night Football. (The play was known by the Redskins as the Throwback Special.) Over the course of a weekend we follow the men as they choose roles;...

Contains thirty-eight stories from the author's mellow, humorous, and ironic moods.