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- George Saunders is probably the only National Magazine Award winner and best-selling short-story author to have spent time on an oil-exploration crew in the jungles of Sumatra. A former geophysical engineer and tech writer, Saunders has contributed more than thirty-five pieces to The New Yorker since 1992. This past week, he won both the Story Prize and the inaugural Folio Prize for his latest collection, “Tenth of December.” As Michiko Kakutani remarked in an early review of his first story collection, “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline,” Saunders writes like “the illegitimate offspring of Nathanael West and Kurt Vonnegut.” Much of his work is precariously balanced between the grim and the whimsical. Like Vonnegut, he scrutinizes the all-too-strange corners of American life.