Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil - Softcover

George Saunders

3.66

255 ratings by Goodreads

9780747585961: Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0747585962 ISBN 13: 9780747585961

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2007

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Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil

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Book Description
Welcome to Inner Horner, a nation so small it can only accommodate one citizen at a time. The other six citizens must wait their turns in the Short-Term Residency Zone of the surrounding country of Outer Horner. It's a long-standing arrangement between the fantastical, not-exactly-human citizens of the two countries. But when Inner Horner suddenly shrinks, forcing three-quarters of the citizen then in residence over the border into Outer Horner territory, the Outer Hornerites declare an Invasion In Progress--having fallen under the spell of the power-hungry and demagogic Phil.

So begins The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil. Fueled by Saunders's unrivaled wit, outlandish imagination, and incisive political sensibility, here is a deeply strange yet strangely familiar fable of power and impotence, justice and injustice--an Animal Farm for our times.

Praise for George Saunders Author of Pastoralia and Civilwarland in Bad Decline

"An astoundingly tuned voice--graceful, dark, authentic, and funny--telling just the kinds of stories we need to get us through these times."
--Thomas Pynchon

"Mr. Saunders writes like the illegitimate offspring of Nathanael West and Kurt Vonnegut. [His] satiric vision of America is dark and demented; it is also ferocious and very funny."
--Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"A master of distilling the disorders of our time into fiction."
--Salon.com

Amazon.com Exclusive
Want to know the story behind the story of award-winning author George Saunders's new novella, The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil? Then read "Why I Wrote Phil," an exclusive essay from Saunders concerning the genesis of his new work, which has been praised as possessing "an absurdist wit as playful as Monty Python's and a vision as dark as Samuel Beckett's."

Read George Saunders's Essay, "Why I Wrote Phil"

More from George Saunders

Pastoralia

CivilWarLand in Bad Decline

The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip

From the Inside Flap:

"Saunders's prose is like a drug candy, compulsively swallowed, sweetly addictive... Anarchic and startling."
--San Francisco Bay Guardian

"George Saunders is a writer of arresting brilliance and originality." -Tobias Wolff

"Screamingly funny." -Time

"Artful and sophisticated...truly unusual. Imagine Lewis's Babbitt thrown into the backseat of a car going cross-country, driven by R. Crumb, Matt Groening, Lynda Barry, Harvey Pekar or Spike Jonze. That'd be a story Saunders could tell." -The New York Times

"The bold successor to Thomas Pynchon and Kurt Vonnegut." -Nylon

"A searing satirist with a peculiar sensibility that allows him to wreak havok on a cheesy American landscape that is often uproariously implausible yet sickeningly familiar."
-The Boston Globe

"A brilliant distortionist who devises dark, hallucinatory arenas and sets fierce satires against countercurrents of grotesque sentimentality." -The Village Voice

"Saunders is a provocateur, a moralist, a zealot, a lefty, and a funny, funny writer."
-Esquire

"George Saunders is one of the most intriguing writers alive. His work is socially complex, critically engaging to both the academic and the casual reader, and has inspired a cult status not unlike that of Pynchon and Vonnegut." -Bookninja.com

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