I've been really into George Saunders lately. He's a lib but hates this capital-dominated world. His stories are often turn out as soft scifi, where he takes a single contradiction of capitalism and turns the volume way up to show how perverse it really is. He also has the love, tenderness and compassion of a :vonnegut:, but his writing style is very different.

These are a few of his finest stories (IMO):

The Semplica Girl Diaries is about the stress of workers kept perpetually on the edge of poverty, and the normalization of exploitation of the third world.

Ghoul is a great new story of him that I thought was about labour, but develops into a story about living in a completely fucked system but no one is allowed to talk about how it's fucked.

Brad Carrigan, American is one of his most insane stories about the depravity of commercial entrainment media, and the feeling of being trapped in a system where you have to have to participate in a series of constantly ratcheting-up expectations or fail.