BOOK COLLECTOR

The Braindead Megaphone by George Saunders Riverhead Books; 257 pages; $14 Twenty years ago, in that distant past we now call the mid-’90s, the American literati beatified George Saunders as their hallowed saint of short story writing--a torch passed from Cheever to Carver to Saunders. Often associated with the McSweeney’s generation, Saunders solidified his rank among the upper-echelons of literary fame--along with other notables, namely David Foster Wallace, William T. Vollmann, & Junot Diaz--declared by  The New Yorker ’s 20 Best Writers Under 40 issue. By the turn of the century, Saunders had published the critically acclaimed CivilWarLand in Bad Decline & snagged a few minor writerly awards along the way. Since then, in the last fifteen years, the New York darling has written at least three novellas, three widely popular short story collections, one book of essays, and a smattering of nonfiction, in addition to garnering, among other prizes, the highly covete...

Pulphead by John Jeremiah Sullivan Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 365 pages, $16 2011 NBCCA Non-fiction finalist After reading Pulphead, John Jeremiah Sullivan’s most recent & superb collection of essays, it’s easy to see why critics lionize him. NPR reviewer, Dan Kois refers to this collection as “among the liveliest magazine features written by anyone in the past 10 years”. So, it should come as no surprise that he garnered  the auspicious guest editor role for The Best American Essays 2014 . In the last decade, Sullivan’s work has frequently appeared in GQ , Harper’s , New York Times Magazine , and Oxford American --to name a few. Most of the fourteen essays in Pulphead have appeared in revised versions elsewhere but having them together in one collection feels like an extra special treat.  Read a couple of Sullivan’s essays and you'll see that he's a writer of tactical reversals & coy suspense, of candid admissions and genial first-person presence, of a...