Name: The Brain-Dead Megaphone
ISBN: 9781408822524

George Saunders

In this, his first collection of essays, Saunders trains his eye on the real world rather than the fictional and reveals it to be brimming with wonderful, marvellous strangeness. As he faces a political and cultural reality saturated with lazy media, false promises and political doublespeak, Saunders invokes the wisdom of American literary heroes Twain, Vonnegut and Barthelme and inspires us to re-examine our assumptions about the world we live in, as we struggle to discover what is really there.

The Brain-Dead Megaphone

Edward Steel

In a compilation of nonfiction essays, the author shares his thoughts on literature, politics, and travel.

Essays

The Braindead Megaphone

Some of the essays (Braindead Megaphone, the ones about People Refusing to Kill for Abstraction) very prescient. I think his descriptions of Dubai/Nepal tinge into exoticism at the time, but this is from 2007. Some of the literature ones I am not familiar w/ the subject enough to engage. 

Shohini Gupta

Christopher McCaffery

A lot of this has aged very poorly, especially all the stuff about Bush admin politics, but there are some really charming bits throughout.

Barry Hess

So if I'm being honest, I'd probably give this book a four-star review; there are some three-star essays and some five-star essays. However, the three or four five-star essays make the book for me. The titular essay is fantastic, His essays on _Johnny Tremain_, "The School", and _Adventures of Huckleberry Finn_ are very thought provoking, and in some cases inspiring.

Daryl Houston

Several really good essays in this book. Something about Saunders really just clicks with me -- for example, upon reading his essay on Barthelme's "The School," I went back to my copy of B's Sixty Stories to revisit and found that it was the only story in that collection I had dog-eared. I didn't love all the essays in this book, but several really worked for me, and the letter from a dog (not precisely an essay) made me cackle when I first read it and cackle again when trying to keep a straight face while reading it aloud to my family later.

Kevin Juneos Mei Le

Jacob Mishook

Giovanni Garcia-Fenech 

In the same vein as his much-loved weekly column for the Guardian Magazine, this is a hilarious and incisive collection of essays from George Saunders.

The Brain-Dead Megaphone

Reviews

Highlights