CivilWarLand in Bad Decline

CivilWarLand in Bad Decline is the American writer George Saunders's first book, published in 1996, and it holds six short stories with a novella, Bounty, at the end.

Many of the pieces appeared in magazines before they were collected, in different forms, and among the places that published them are the Kenyon Review, Harper's, The New Yorker and Quarterly West. The book was named a Notable Book of 1996 by The New York Times and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award in the same year.

The people in these stories are all trying to get by in a world that has come off its rails, and their jobs, their families and the language of self-improvement have stopped matching the reality around them. The novella that closes the book follows Bounty as he travels, and it is the longest single piece in the volume.