"Wickedly entertaining... Pastoralia is a Dilbert cartoon inked by Samuel Beckett."
—San Francisco Chronicle

"Saunders is a provocateur, a moralist, a zealot, a lefty, and a funny, funny writer, and the stories in Pastoralia delight. We're very lucky to have them."
—Esquire

"The bold successor to Thomas Pynchon and Kurt Vonnegut."
—Nylon

"Savage, soulful satires...[Saunders is] a master of distilling the disorders of our time into fiction."
—Salon

"Stories so precisely rendered and wildly creative, these worlds become favorite places to return to. Saunders's prose is like drug candy, compulsively swallowed, sweetly addictive...anarchic and startling."
—San Francisco Bay Guardian

"Like Flannery O'Connor and Nathanael West, Saunders knows that you can mine the banal for humor. Close to miraculous...utterly wonderful."
—The Austin Chronicle

"Demands to be reread immediately."
—The Wall Street Journal

"Taut, witty, disturbing...derivative of nobody. [Pastoralia's] stories are every bit as finely tuned, mordantly funny, and original as those in CivilWarLand in Bad Decline."
—The Atlantic Monthly

"Fiercely funny...[Saunders is] a searing satirist with a peculiar sensibility that allows him to wreak havoc on a cheesy American landscape that is often uproariously implausible yet sickeningly familiar...[A] striking collection."
—The Boston Globe

"Bizarre and original stories...freakish and lovely. It [looks] as of Saunders has forged a one-man genre; call it Theme Park Surrealism."
—LA Weekly

"Hilarious and heartrending in equal measures...Like Nathanael West, Saunders is a brilliant distortionist who devises dark, hallucinatory arenas and sets fierce satires against countercurrents of grotesque sentimentality. Pathos is Saunders's great theme, and given the breadth of his satires, he's driven to find it in the most extreme and unlikely circumstances."
—The Village Voice