Three families live in the seaside village of Frip—the Romos, the Ronsens, and a little girl named Capable and her widowed father. The townspeople of Frip make their living raising goats, but they must fight off a daily invasion of gappers, bright orange, many-eyed creatures that cover goats and stop them from giving milk. When the gappers target Capable’s goats, the Romos and the Ronsens turn their backs on the gapper-ridden Capable. What will Capable do about her gapper plague? An imaginative tale accented with haunting illustrations, The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip is an adult story for children, a children’s story for adults, an oceanside fable for the irremediably landlocked, a fish story for loaves, and a fable about the true meaning of community.
“Saunders’s poignant, profound style lifts [The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip] from the zone of the merely weird into some kind of wonderful.” —Entertainment Weekly
George Saunders is the author of Pastoralia, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, and most recently In Persuasion Nation. His stories frequently appear in the New Yorker and elsewhere.
