From the Academy

The Academy is a great store of knowledge and opinion about great books. From time to time we ask its members to write a short piece on books they have admired. Here are some of their responses, most recently about 2015 Folio Prize winner Akhil Sharma’s Family Life, and further back about the one book they would have liked to win the Prize if it had always existed.

Rivka Galchen on 2014 Folio Prize Winner George Saunders

saundersThe stories in The Tenth of December are like parables that are also satires and also Chekhovian realism and also like nothing else: they’re brilliant. With dark humor and uneasy compassion they show us that the aggrieved and the belittled and the lonely and the unfortunate are not just the adjectives we easily assign to them, and that also, naturally, they are ourselves. “Guy must have had his hopes and dreams, closet full of pants, and so on,” says a character in the title story as he thinks back upon an exhibit that showed the brain of a man who had died of a tumor. That’s classic Saunders: compassion even for a dissected organ. He is also unpredictably wild – The Semplica-Girl Diaries tells of a man trying to be a good paterfamilias and so saving up to buy his family the luxury of women strung up as lawn ornaments – and darkly hilarious. His sensitivity to the way we speak today is another perpetual pleasure in his writing: one story tells of a court-martialed veteran of the Iraq war to whom everyone unnervingly says the same blank thing – thank you for your service! Saunders reveals the strangenesses, lies and music of modern language. For many years now, he has been a favourite writer of nearly all writers; now he’s deservedly a favourite of readers everywhere.