A masterful new collection from "the best short story writer in English" (Time), exploring power, ethics, and justice in a world both absurd and deeply human.

MacArthur "Genius" and Booker Prize-winner George Saunders returns with Liberation Day, his first short story collection in ten years. Wickedly funny, unsentimental, and razor-sharp, these nine stories illuminate our troubled world with both compassion and biting satire. From dystopian futures to existential reckonings, Saunders' characters navigate joy and despair, oppression and revolution, bizarre fantasy and brutal reality.

In Love Letter, a grandfather writes to his grandson amid a politically fraught near-future, reflecting on duty, ideals, and the fight for justice. Ghoul follows Brian, a lonely worker in a Hell-themed underground amusement park in Colorado, as he begins to question the nature of his so-called reality. In Mother’s Day, two women bound by a shared past and love for the same man face an unexpected reckoning during a hailstorm. And Elliott Spencer tells the unsettling tale of an elderly man whose memory has been wiped as part of a sinister political scheme.

Profound, subversive, and utterly essential, Liberation Day cements Saunders’ place as a literary visionary. These stories challenge and surprise, offering a generous yet unflinching look at what it means to live in community with others—even in the most absurd of circumstances.