When “CivilWarLand” first came out, there was a lot of talk about Saunders as a new, savage, satirical voice bursting onto the scene, though he’d been publishing the stories one at a time over eight years, writing them while making a living at a day job preparing technical reports for a company called the Radian Corporation, in Rochester. His stories are set in what might be described as a just slightly futuristic America or, maybe better, present-day America, where, because of the exigencies of capitalism, things have gotten a little weird. These initial stories often take place in theme parks gone to seed or soul-withering exurban office strips, but the stories themselves are overflowing with vitality; they are sometimes very dark but they are also very, very funny. The characters speak in a strange new language — a kind of heightened bureaucratese, or a passively received vernacular that is built around self-improvement clichés (“It made me livid and twice that night I had to step into a closet and perform my Hatred Abatement Breathing”) — and this lends them the feeling of allegory, though they are something else too, that’s harder to place. The book was published right around the same time as David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest,” and it felt back then as if those two writers (and a handful of others) were busy establishing the new terms for contemporary American fiction.

I remember Wallace coming into the offices of Harper’s Magazine, where I worked at the time, just before or after the book party for “Infinite Jest” (which has maybe gotten more attention than any book party in memory, with the descriptions of Wallace hiding in an upstairs room, away from the hundreds of people there to celebrate or be close to his genius). It’s hard to know now if Wallace actually looked spooked or if I’m projecting that look back onto him, but I do clearly recall him standing in the hall in his untied high-tops, saying that George Saunders was the most exciting writer in America.

That kind of thing has been said a lot about Saunders since then. For people who pay close attention to the state of American fiction, he has become a kind of superhero. His stories now appear regularly in The New Yorker, he has been anthologized all over the place, and he has won a bunch of awards, among them a “genius grant” in 2006 from the MacArthur Foundation, which described him as a “highly imaginative author [who] continues to influence a generation of young writers and brings to contemporary American fiction a sense of humor, pathos and literary style all his own.” As Joshua Ferris recently wrote in an introduction for the reissue last fall, in e-book form, of “CivilWarLand”: “Part of the reason it’s so hard to talk about him is the shared acknowledgment among writers that Saunders is somehow a little more than just a writer. . . . [He] writes like something of a saint. He seems in touch with some better being.”

It is true that if there exists a “writer’s writer,” Saunders is the guy. “There is really no one like him,” Lorrie Moore wrote. “He is an original — but everyone knows that.” Tobias Wolff, who taught Saunders when he was in the graduate writing program at Syracuse in the mid-’80s, said, “He’s been one of the luminous spots of our literature for the past 20 years,” and then added what may be the most elegant compliment I’ve ever heard paid to another person: “He’s such a generous spirit, you’d be embarrassed to behave in a small way around him.” And Mary Karr, who has been a colleague of Saunders’s at Syracuse since he joined the faculty in the mid-’90s (and who also, incidentally, is a practicing Catholic with a wonderful singing voice and a spectacularly inventive foul mouth), told me, “I think he’s the best short-story writer in English alive.”

Aside from all the formal invention and satirical energy of Saunders’s fiction, the main thing about it, which tends not to get its due, is how much it makes you feel. I’ve loved Saunders’s work for years and spent a lot of hours with him over the past few months trying to understand how he’s able to do what he does, but it has been a real struggle to find an accurate way to express my emotional response to his stories. One thing is that you read them and you feel known, if that makes any sense. Or, possibly even woollier, you feel as if he understands humanity in a way that no one else quite does, and you’re comforted by it. Even if that comfort often comes in very strange packages, like say, a story in which a once-chaste aunt comes back from the dead to encourage her nephew, who works at a male-stripper restaurant (sort of like Hooters, except with guys, and sleazier), to start unzipping and showing his wares to the patrons, so he can make extra tips and help his family avert a tragic future that she has foretold.

Junot Díaz described the Saunders’s effect to me this way: “There’s no one who has a better eye for the absurd and dehumanizing parameters of our current culture of capital. But then the other side is how the cool rigor of his fiction is counterbalanced by this enormous compassion. Just how capacious his moral vision is sometimes gets lost, because few people cut as hard or deep as Saunders does.”

And “Tenth of December” is more moving and emotionally accessible than anything that has come before. “I want to be more expansive,” Saunders said. “If there are 10 readers out there, let’s assume I’m never going to reach two of them. They’ll never be interested. And let’s say I’ve already got three of them, maybe four. If there’s something in my work that’s making numbers five, six and seven turn off to it, I’d like to figure out what that is. I can’t change who I am and what I do, but maybe there’s a way to reach those good and dedicated readers that the first few books might not have appealed to. I’d like to make a basket big enough that it included them.”