Heartbreaking and funny and totally modern. It’s a masterpiece, in my opinion just the best short story ever written. Gogol is a writer I always go back to again and again. As things happen at speed, you might not have seen the signals. The thrilling thing about it is as you read it and you can more actively imagine yourself in that situation, and well, maybe you wouldn’t have been such a good guy.

Because it’s happening to him, and of course he is thinking about how his stomach hurts, how his wife is being a pain, how he just learned to drive a car, oh and by the way, they just took my office. And very slowly over the course of hundreds of pages he begins to realize what’s really going on. He just thinks some pain-in-the-butts from Berlin are making trouble, being stupid. And what’s beautiful about it is that he is kind of not really aware - well he doesn’t know that the Holocaust is the Holocaust. “I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1933-1941,” by Victor Klemperer So it was the first time I saw a place that I knew represented in fiction, and it kind of came alive for me. Actually one of the stories in there, “Hot Ice,” is the one that really made me become a writer because it was set in my dad’s old neighborhood. “The Coast of Chicago,” such a beautiful book. This segment originally aired February 4, 2013 Saunders visited the KUOW studios and gave us five amazing books that he thinks everybody should read. It took author George Saunders seven years to write his collection of stories, “Tenth of December.” But for many fans, (including the New York Times Magazine which called his new story collection “the best book you’ll read this year”), the wait was been worth it.

Tenth of december new yorker