CivilWarLand in Bad Decline

A theme park where Civil War reenactors keep getting shot by actual gangs. A corporate memo written in the language of empowerment while workers are destroyed by the system it describes. A haunted theme park. A futuristic advertising dystopia. Saunders's first collection of stories is set in a near-future America of corporate euphemism and spectacular moral failure — and the horror of it is that the language his characters use to describe their situation is recognizably the language of the actual present. The most precise satirist of late capitalism's language writing in America today: the gap between what corporations say and what they do is Saunders's entire subject, and he renders it with a black comedy that makes you laugh and then feel terrible about laughing, which is exactly the right response. The essential companion to Capitalist Realism — Fisher names the system, Saunders makes you feel its texture in your body.