Mary Gaitskill’s novel, Veronica, was lauded by 2005 National Book Award judges as “the ultimate hat trick of fiction: appalling, shocking, even offensive, but at the end of the day enormously illuminating.” Her earlier works of fiction include Because They Wanted To (1997), Bad Behavior (1988) and Two Girls, Fat and Thin (1991).

A mischievous satirist of American culture, George Saunders has been compared to Jonathan Swift, Voltaire and Don DeLillo. Thomas Pynchon distinguishes Saunders as “an astoundingly tuned voice—graceful, dark, authentic, and funny.” Saunders’ latest book of stories In Persuasion Nation (2006) joins former collections Pastoralia (2001) and CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (1997).

Gaitskill and Saunders regularly appear in Harper’s, The New Yorker and The O. Henry Prize Stories. Both teach creative writing at Syracuse University.

Gaitskill’s art is about nothing so transgressive as the confusion to which much modern living tends.

— Wyatt Mason, Harper’s

Saunders is a provocateur, a moralist, a zealot, a lefty, and a funny, funny writer”

— Esquire

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