Caroline Peters / Giorgi Gigashvili

In »The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil«, George Saunders tells of the land of Inner Horner, which is so small that there is only room for one person. The rest of the population has to wait in the short-term residence zone of the surrounding country of Outer Horner until it is swapped, as the citizens of the country have agreed. But when Inner Horner suddenly shrinks one day and three-quarters of its current population protrude over the border into the territory of Outer Horner, the Outer Hornerites realise that an invasion is underway and fall under the spell of the power-hungry, narcissistic and authoritarian Phil. It is the beginning of his short, but all the more terrifying reign. 

With his short novel, Saunders launched a literary attempt to distil an »essential human defect« from the »desparate disasters« of the 20th century, such as the Holocaust and other »historical monstrosities«, which is inherent in all the excesses of history, by means of a grotesque.