In the preface he wrote for a new edition of his first book, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, George Saunders describes the first time his family went to a theme park—and the effect it had on him: “I loved it so thoroughly that, all the way back to Chicago in the car, I conspired with my sister to build a scale model of it…. Well, that never happened. But I still remember the baffled joy I felt on leaving the place, thinking: Wow, someone did this, someone made all this, some grown-up sat down and designed the little Mexican back alleys and cowboy boardwalks, the fake bird sounds….In a sense, these stories were that scale model, much delayed.” Saunders writes satire with a heart, exploding the pretensions of corporate language and values and the ways such language and values infect us as thinking, feeling people. This course will focus on his thoughtful, provocative essays, short stories, and close readings of short stories by Russian masters (Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Gogol). Saunders teaches us to notice details and interpret them, in fiction and in life.