TENTH OF DECEMBER Stories

Saunders’s untrained voice is the perfect conveyance for the earnest vernacular of his offbeat characters—and a convincing case for the argument that an author can be the best interpreter of his own text. In a society where the best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity, Saunders’s tales of flat-brained parents and well-meaning neighbors and martinet lab directors are simultaneously terrifying and hilarious. His delivery is deadpan, after a fashion known in times past as frontier humor. Here the amazing feats are ones of outlook and mental construction rather than the muscular exploits of a jumping frog or a steamboat captain. The effect lies in an idiom forever out of sorts with the situation at hand—a subtly nuanced contemporary babble that Saunders captures so well on the page, and even better in this memorable audio production. D.A.W. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2013, Portland, Maine [Published: FEBRUARY 2013]