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A favourite short story of mine is "Jon" by George Saunders, which ran in the New Yorker a couple of years ago. He's had a couple of pieces run in the magazine since then, which have been okay, and I've read his published short story collections, which are highly recommended, though I don't know that any of the single stories were as good as "Jon". Or at least not as good as I remember "Jon" being, since I haven't read it in a few years. I was poking around the web for it a bit, and though the New Yorker's online archives expire after a while, it turns out that it was published as part of a sci-fi anthology, which Amazon.com sells used. So I'll get my hands on that soon.

Update: The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine has a cached copy of the piece, so do go ahead and read it.

I started thinking about Saunders again because he has another short story in this week's New Yorker (which is still available online). The start of the story smacks of impenetrability, and as is true with a lot of his work you have to suck it up and read on for a bit before you can completely makes sense of the setting and backstory. It employs some of the syntactic humour that he's known for, but on the whole it's fairly seriously and, in a way, touching.

It looks like he has a new book coming out in September, in case you needed something to look forward to in September (if, for instance, you didn't get tickets for The Arcade Fire in Central Park).

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