CivilWarLand in Bad Decline

In a rave review in The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani had high praise for Saunders' writing style: "He's a savage satirist with a sentimental streak who delineates, in these pages, the dark underbelly of the American dream: the losses, delusions and terrors suffered by the lonely, the disenfranchised, the downtrodden and the plain unlucky." Comparing him to Nathanael West, she concluded, "Mr. Saunders' satiric vision of America is dark and demented; it's also ferocious and very funny."^[4]

In the same magazine, Jay McInerney dismissed the story "Downtrodden Mary's Failed Campaign of Terror" as having too many "wacky tics" but still described the overall collection as "just about the quirkiest and most accomplished short-story debut since Barry Hannah's 'Airships'", a 1978 collection. McInerney also said, "Quite unexpectedly, between guffaws, you find yourself moved. Mr. Saunders is one of those rare writers who can effortlessly blend satire and sentiment", particularly praising the story "Offloading for Mrs. Schwartz".^[5]

A reviewer for Kirkus Reviews wrote that the "politics of scarcity are brilliantly fictionalized in these smart and understated stories".^[6] Novelist Thomas Pynchon also saw in Saunders a vital new voice in American fiction: "An astoundingly tuned voice—graceful, dark, authentic, and funny—telling just the kinds of stories we need to get us through these times.”^[7]

In Publishers Weekly, conversely, a reviewer lauded Saunders as having a rich vision and "occasionally heart-melting prose", but stated that there is little difference in voice to distinguish one story from another.^[8] Richard Eder wrote in the Los Angeles Times that "Saunders can be wickedly ingenious and very funny. He takes a conversational line and disrupts it into comic disquiet. [...] Saunders is an imaginative ironist and an inventive absurdist". However, Eder also argued that the author has a weaker sense of moral engagement than satirists like George Orwell and Jonathan Swift, as well as too little narration, with the critic billing "Bounty" as "a series of scenes set one beside the other without much sense of development".^[9]

• Two stories from the collection received the National Magazine Award for Fiction: "The 400-Pound CEO" in 1994, and "Bounty" in 1996.^[10]