The characters in these absurdly funny stories are trapped by hyper-capitalism and their own foolishness, as Saunders investigates the prisons we make for ourselves

“The land of the short story is a brutal land, a land very similar, in its strictness, to the land of the joke.” George Saunders was writing about the unforgiving nature of the short form, but he might as well have been referring to the worlds in which his characters are trapped. Why is such a nice man so mean to the nice people he invents?

In interviews, Saunders comes across as a benignly thoughtful regular guy, a practising Buddhist who constantly tries for kindness. Some part of his writing day, however, is spent imagining complex and original ways to punish the people he has created. They are trapped by their own foolishness, or by the dreams of hyper-capitalism. They are also sometimes locked up underground, or suspended in intriguing configurations. “Suspended” here does not just mean “existing between one state and another” – though they are also that. It means hung up and left dangling, like abandoned puppets.

Why was she holding a can opener?

Hmm.