About the Author: George Saunders
George Saunders was born December 2, 1958 and raised on the south side of Chicago. In 1981 he received a B.S. in Geophysical Engineering from Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colorado. He worked at Radian International, an environmental engineering firm in Rochester, NY as a technical writer and geophysical engineer from 1989 to 1996. He has also worked in Sumatra on an oil exploration geophysics crew, as a doorman in Beverly Hills, a roofer in Chicago, a convenience store clerk, a guitarist in a Texas country-and-western band, and a knuckle-puller in a West Texas slaughterhouse.
After reading in People magazine about the Master's program at Syracuse University, he applied. Mr. Saunders received an MA with an emphasis in creative writing in 1988. His thesis advisor was Doug Unger.
He has been an Assistant Professor, Syracuse University Creative Writing Program since 1997. He has also been a Visiting Writer at Vermont Studio Center, University of Georgia MayMester Program, University of Denver, University of Texas at Austin, St. Petersburg Literary Seminar (St. Petersburg, Russia, Summer 2000), Brown University, Dickinson College, Hobart & William Smith Colleges.
He conducted a Guest Workshop at the Eastman School of Music, Fall 1995, and was an Adjunct Professor at Saint John Fisher College, Rochester, New York, 1990-1995; and Adjunct Professor at Siena College, Loudonville, New York in Fall 1989.
He is married and has two children.
His favorite charity is a project to educate Tibetan refugee children in Nepal. Information on this can be found at http://www.tibetan-buddhist.org/index...
Find the best price forThe Very Persistent Gappers of Frip
George Saunders, Lane Smith
Goodreads rating: 
Paperback, Published in Feb 2010 by Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
ISBN10: 0747576114 | ISBN13: 9780747576112
Page count: 84
A Review of The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip
Move over, Bill Bennett—the inimitable short story master George Saunders (Pastoralia) and acclaimed illustrator Lane Smith (The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales) have created an astonishing new book of virtues for the child in all of us. Alternately haunting and hilarious, The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip reaffirms the age-old message of the Golden Rule while simultaneously lampooning the great American institutions of social conservatism and religious chauvinism, along with its inbred kissing cousin, evangelical consumerism.
For as long as anyone can remember, the inhabitants of the tiny seaside village of Frip have raised goats, eking out a living by supplying the neighboring villages with goat milk. For just as long, Frip has been plagued by a colony of dim-witted, multi-eyed, goat-loving aquatic cockleburs known as gappers. Each morning the gappers wriggle from the waves to serenade the smelly objects of their affection and, each day, the weary children of Frip dutifully remove the pests with gapper-brushes, collect them in gapper-sacks, and toss them back into the sea.
As all good things must come to an end—in parables, allegories, and illustrated fables, anyway—the day soon comes when the staid Frippian monoculture must confront a radically new paradigm. More specifically, one morning, a moderately less-stupid gapper realizes that one of the village's three houses is considerably closer to the water's edge than the other two and, for efficiency's sake, he urges his fellow gappers to concentrate their goat-addled adorations on this single location. For the neighboring Romo and Ronson families, this newly gapperless situation is the occasion for considerable self-congratulatory enthusiasm. However, for young Capable and her recently widowed father, who now must treble their gapper-brushing, sacking, and tossing efforts, this turn of events is overwhelming.
Capable's appeals for neighborly assistance are greeted with pompous disbelief ("Are those gappers our gappers? Are those goats our goats?), and her attempts to get rid of the gappers, while ingenious, end in failure...until she decides upon a course of action so simple—and yet so radical—that nothing and no one in the village of Frip will ever be the same.
—Greg Marrs
Compare New Book Prices for The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip
SEARCHING FOR PRICES...