Whatever your supposed politics are - left, right - if you put it in a human connection, most people will rise to the occasion and feel the human pain in a way that they might not if it was presented in a more conceptual way.

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.