George Saunders Archive
The Ghost in the Room
Recently published stories by George Saunders and Kate Walbert are about remembering more than they are about the past.
Grief in Lincoln in the Bardo
George Saunders’ most recent book acknowledges that to write a historical novel is to look at bones and imagine them as flesh and spirit.
Sudden, Gradual Change
I had been trying to get my 4-year-old daughter to put her face in the water at the pool for two years before she just suddenly did it one day—one night, really, near the end of this summer, the light dying, the rest of us standing poolside with our
George Saunders, Alice Munro, and the Opposite Poles of New Yorker Fiction
The New Yorker has published more than fifty short stories by Alice Munro and more than twenty by George Saunders. Munro first made the cut in 1977. Saunders began publishing short fiction in the magazine in 1992.
Reentry
In literature, a return to a previously inhabited place or state often becomes a means of measuring. Here we are, back in the same place, yet not quite the same. What has changed, and what hasn’t, and what does that balance of sameness and difference do to us?
“There’s only one subject. That’s the trouble”: DeLillo and Saunders in 2017
The first paragraph I wrote after reading Saunders’s essay felt exhausting. Every sentence felt vague and hollow. But good: a feeling akin to my physical therapist standing beside me, correcting the form on my squats. Painful but good when I got it right.
Round-Up: Mark Twain, George Saunders, and Barack Obama
From Mark Twain's unpublished story to Former President Obama's relationship with books, here's the latest literary news.
Speaking of Megaphones: Why Reading Literature Now Might Be Useful
I could spin many narratives for why I wanted this series. Instead I'll be honest with you: it was mostly for my own sanity. Maybe you've got a better handle on this than I do, but my way of engaging with our daily media does not feel particularly healthy,
How a Polar Bear with an Axe in its Head Might Save You: Two Stories by George Saunders
The Inner Hornerites finally have chance to strike back. They've been taxed and belittled, imprisoned in a Short-Term Residency Zone, their friend Cal disassembled by Phil's Special Friends before their eyes.
Origin Stories: Zachary Tyler Vickers’s CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR MARTYRDOM!
In the first story of Zachary Tyler Vickers’s remarkable new collection, Congratulations on Your Martyrdom!, an origami hobbyist with pathologically stubby fingers is stuffed like the roadkill he prepares for children. If you’re looking for the fiction about married people drinking lattes, this probably isn’t the book for you.
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