How to Love a Monster

George Saunders has spent a career unpacking one of the central contradictions of life: that we are loving creatures capable of creating monstrous worlds. Since his debut collection in 1996, Saunders has become something of a secular saint, a writer whose sense of the world’s abounding horrors is balanced with a trademark humor and humanity. In one way, his most recent offering, Vigil, is the extension of those themes his devotees have come to love. But in a different way, Vigil opens up entirely new ground, by asking what it means to view the world’s depravities not just as wrongs to be made right, but as wounds to be healed.