“Kind of Magic Back Here”: Gardening and Human Limitations in George Saunders’s “The Semplica Girl Diaries”

Previous scholars have noted George Saunders’s interest in critiquing American consumerist mentality and satirizing corporate ethics. A smaller number have studied Saunders’s interest in the human experience as defined through a spiritual quest. The material and spiritual collide in this essay, which studies Saunders’s use of the Semplica Girls, in “The Semplica Girl Diaries,” to embody an intersection between our human limitations and our responses to those limitations through material, aesthetic, and spiritual avenues.