George Saunders has a new short story collection out—finally, she said grumpily. It's called Tenth of December, and it arrives in stores and in your Kindles on Tuesday.

Saunders is one of the great living American writers. But don't take my word for it—this lengthy New York Times Magazine profile couldn't be more glowing:

It’s the trope of all tropes to say that a writer is “the writer for our time.” Still, if we were to define “our time” as a historical moment in which the country we live in is dropping bombs on people about whose lives we have the most abstracted and unnuanced ideas, and who have the most distorted notions of ours; or a time in which some of us are desperate simply for a job that would lead to the ability to purchase a few things that would make our kids happy and result in an uptick in self- and family esteem; or even just a time when a portion of the population occasionally feels scared out of its wits for reasons that are hard to name, or overcome with emotion when we see our children asleep, or happy when we risk revealing ourselves to someone and they respond with kindness — if we define “our time” in these ways, then George Saunders is the writer for our time.

The New Yorker recently published the title story, and it's a heartbreaker.

And if you missed it, the publisher's style sheet for Tenth of December was floating around recently. It's hilarious, and a handy reference if you've ever wondered if "pre-boner" should be hyphenated.