Satirist George Saunders illuminates life’s grit and ridiculousness
Texas State’s English Department, Katherine Anne Porter Literary Center, and Wittliff Collections, with support of the Burdine Johnson Foundation, are pleased to co-sponsor a reading and book signing with American satirist George Saunders.
The event is at 3:30 p.m. on April 14 at the Wittliff Collections in the Alkek Library. Saunders will also appear at 7:30 on April 15 at the Katherine Anne Porter Literary Center in Kyle, Texas, as part of the TKL Reading Series. Admission is free, encouraged, and open to the public.
The writer of The Braindead Megaphone, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, Pastoralia, The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, In Persuasion Nation, and a children’s book, The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip, George Saunders is a New York Times best-selling author and teaches at Syracuse University. The winner of the National Magazine Award for fiction several times, he’s also been published in the New Yorker, GQ, and Harper’s.
Through George Saunders’ kaleidoscopic words, we see his world, much like ours but cut and rearranged into colorful, sometimes grotesque, and always brilliant pieces. In his stories—both fiction and non—we see our own grit, difficulties, and downright silliness. Saunders has a way of taking the most serious of situations and cracking them open to reveal their guts. His anti-aggression works—cultural essays in The Braindead Megaphone and fiction pieces like “Sea Oak”—enable us to see how lovely and strange our world is. His words simultaneously illuminate life’s simple elegance and ridiculousness.
Saunders’ understanding of the labor class that often infuses his fiction is based partly on his very un-academic working past. His undergraduate degree was in Geophysical Engineering from Colorado School of Mines, and previous to that, he worked as a roofer, a knuckle-puller in a slaughterhouse, a doorman in Beverly Hills, and a clerk at a convenience store.
More about the author, plus his interviews with Stephen Colbert and David Letterman, are at www.saunderssaunderssaunders.com.
—Submitted by Katie Angermeier
CONTACTS: The Wittliff Collections—Michele M. Miller. 245-1442, mm57@txstate.edu
Alkek Library—Pat Hawthorne, 245-3895, ph30@txstate.edu
ONLINE info about this event:
http://www.thewittliffcollections.txstate.edu/exhibitions-events/events.html
