"Anyone who loves George Saunders's writing can tell you about his wicked imagination: luminous, dark, wholly original, and quite frequently supernatural. Saunders is, after all, the man who gave us Lincoln in the Bardo, about a grieving president and the chorus of ghosts he meets in the graveyard; " Escape From Spiderhead," a Huxley-esque vision of criminal justice and personal responsibility; and "Fox 8," about a fox who begins to understand human language by eavesdropping on people's bedtime stories."
"I have a really low threshold for vibe. Just whatever. There's something that happens, I think neurologically, where I'm just like, Okay, this is serious now. I can be on a bus or on a plane, and it's just like some walls go up where I'm like, Okay, we're not going outside of this sacred space. I do think of it as sacred."
George Saunders's imagination is luminous, dark, wholly original, and often supernatural. His noted works include Lincoln in the Bardo, Escape From Spiderhead, Fox 8, and Vigil, which combine uncanny elements with moral and emotional urgency. Twin currents run through his work: large-heartedness paired with unsparing wit. Humor and compassion often appear together, producing both hilarity and gravity. Saunders approaches composition with a flexible sense of place, treating the writing moment as a sacred space that can occur anywhere. He relies on small ritual objects and touchstones, including an Ed Ruscha quote and a family photograph, to anchor his process.
Read at The Atlantic
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]