George Saunders: satirist.

• Author: Siegal, Nina

American fiction has become a largely apolitical affair in recent years, with even the savviest social novelists, such as Jonathan Franzen, shrinking from sweeping cultural critiques. A notable exception is George Saunders, the contemporary master of the darkly comic short story, and the closest thing our literary moment has to Mark Twain.

"He's one of the only effective social satirists writing fiction today," says Deborah Treisman, fiction editor of The New Yorker magazine, which has published at least one or two Saunders stories a year since the mid-1990s.

The author of two acclaimed short story collections, Pastoralia and CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, Saunders has also written a novella, The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, and a children's book, The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip. In April, Riverhead released his third collection of short stories, In Persuasion Nation, which Publisher's Weekly calls "his best work yet."

A Saunders story typically operates by some gross exaggeration of contemporary life, set in a not-too-distant future where things have gone irrevocably haywire. His admixture of comedy and pathos, absurdity and realism, and his playful touch make it so you barely feel the political sting. But it's there.

Saunders doesn't love the term "political" to describe his work. Any attempt to advocate a particular political stance would be "death for storytelling, because it implies a kind of incuriosity," he tells me, and because "fiction should always be ... complicating our habitual view of things."

By the same token, he believes in "ethical" fiction. "The main thing that fiction does is rev up the quality of our awareness, make us more involved in the world, more enamored of it," he says. "And this feels political, maybe, especially in a culture like ours, where so much of what we do is infused with dullness and materialist sloth. Fiction is a way to rouse the private voice inside ourselves, which is a very radical thing to do when so much depends on muffling that voice and forcing it into acquiescence."

As far as his own politics, Saunders says, "I'm pretty far left but trying to cultivate a healthy disgust for hypocrites and liars of both political stripes."

Born in 1958 and raised on the South Side of Chicago, Saunders says he was inspired to write by reading Hemingway--and by a high school teacher he had a crush on. But he didn't take the usual route. In 1981, he received a B.S. in Geophysical Engineering from the...