An expansion: An interview with George Saunders

Preparing to interview George Saunders, I kept thinking of 'The Skin', in which Curzio Malaparte writes that after the Allied liberation of Naples, due to the desperate state of its people and the 'freedom' the United States brought with them, you could buy anything in the city - the last virgin in Europe, an American tank, a woman's youngest child - but that when you bought something you weren't really buying it, you were buying a slice of someone's hunger. I can't think of a better analogy for what the works of Saunders illustrate about the world today. Across his short story collections - 'CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, Pastoralia, In Persuasion Nation' and 'Tenth of December' - he shows a present or near-future in which anything and everything has been commodified, where characters sell slices of hunger, aspiration and bare need wholesale.