Tenth of December
Stories
by George Saunders
3 more
Recommended by 5 notable people, including Lena Dunham and Dave Elitch
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Reading Profile
Should I read this?
Reading this collection feels like sitting close to a writer who shifts between sardonic comedy and blunt tenderness. Saunders fills spare pages with oddball, vividly sketched characters, attentive sentence-level inventiveness, and recurring moral jolts; the useful part is how language keeps nudging you toward empathy and surprise. Main limitation: the exuberant, digressive voice and insistently emotional payoff can feel repetitive or overwrought if you prefer leaner plots or more restraint, and several stories favor mood over tidy narrative closure.
Read this if...
- •high-school English teacher building a short-story unit who wants relatively short, discussion-friendly pieces that highlight voice and moral ambiguity for classroom conversation.
- •fiction-writer in an MFA or workshop setting working on voice and sentence-level risk-taking who needs concentrated examples of playful, empathetic narration to study and imitate.
- •busy reader who reads in 20–40 minute bursts and enjoys stories that deliver emotional impact without committing to a long novel; each piece can be consumed in a single commute or evening session.
Skip this if...
- •you'll likely put it down when the sentences grow long and digressive and the voice starts to dominate plot — readers who need clear narrative payoff often lose patience there.
- •annoying if you prefer plot-first or puzzle-driven fiction; many pieces prioritize mood, voice, and moral tension over tidy resolutions.
- •annoying if you dislike explicit sentiment or moral prompting; the emotional intensity and earnestness can feel heavy-handed or repetitive to readers who favor restraint.
Tenth of December is the most honest, moving, and critically acclaimed collection yet from George Saunders, one of the most important writers of his generation. These stories take on the big questions and explore the fault lines of our own morality, the characters vividly and lovingly infused with Saunders's signature blend of exuberant prose, deep...
Before You Buy
Reading Specifications
Difficulty:hard
Audience Fit
- high-school English teacher building a short-story unit who wants relatively short, discussion-friendly pieces that highlight voice and moral ambiguity for classroom conversation.
- fiction-writer in an MFA or workshop setting working on voice and sentence-level risk-taking who needs concentrated examples of playful, empathetic narration to study and imitate.
- busy reader who reads in 20–40 minute bursts and enjoys stories that deliver emotional impact without committing to a long novel; each piece can be consumed in a single commute or evening session.
- you'll likely put it down when the sentences grow long and digressive and the voice starts to dominate plot — readers who need clear narrative payoff often lose patience there.
- annoying if you prefer plot-first or puzzle-driven fiction; many pieces prioritize mood, voice, and moral tension over tidy resolutions.
- annoying if you dislike explicit sentiment or moral prompting; the emotional intensity and earnestness can feel heavy-handed or repetitive to readers who favor restraint.
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Why recommended
Recommended by 7 sources and appears in Short Stories, Most Recommended Books, and Fiction.
Recommended by notable people
People and public figures who have recommended this book.
Recommendation Signals
Recommendation proof is sourced from public posts, interviews, reading lists, and cited references.
Appears In
Not sure if this is the right fit?
Consider The Republic by Plato. Recommended by 13 sources.
“Plato stages an extended Socratic conversation that moves from concrete questions about justice into broad proposals about an ideal city, the structure of the soul, and what counts as reality and knowledge. Reading alternates brisk question-and-answer snippets with long, cumulative demonstrations that reward careful attention and annotation. Main value: a wealth of thought experiments for testing political and ethical intuitions. Main limitation: repetitive refutations, long policy sketches and dense metaphysical passages can feel abstruse and slow; patience and some philosophical background help.”
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How recommendation signals are reviewed
Each recommendation is collected from a public source — interviews, articles, or curated lists — and linked to its original URL. Books with many verifiable recommendations from respected people rank higher.