Fiction is an urgent business. It is the Dying Us telling stories to the Dying Us, trying to crack the nonsense in our heads open with a big hammer pronto, before Death arrives.

His first story collection CivilWarLand in Bad Decline was a finalist for the 1996 PEN/Hemingway Award. A professor at Syracuse University Saunders won the National Magazine Award for fiction in 1994 1996 2000 and 2004 and second prize in the O.