If you think of a work of fiction as a kind of scale model of the world, then the positive valences - where things turn out better than you thought they would - ought to be in there somewhere, too.

His first story collection CivilWarLand in Bad Decline was a finalist for the 1996 PEN/Hemingway Award. A professor at Syracuse University Saunders won the National Magazine Award for fiction in 1994 1996 2000 and 2004 and second prize in the O.