The Story Archive

Pastoralia

George Saunders · 2000 CE · Short Story · Modern / American · Contemporary

Six stories of workers ground down by employers who speak in euphemism, among them a man paid to live as a caveman in a theme-park exhibit and a family dragged into a dead aunt's afterlife of poverty. The corporate dialect is the target as much as the institutions. A story collection that fixed Saunders's reputation as the American satirist of precarious work.

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