George Saunders Never Gives Up On a Character

This past November, I headed to the National Book Award gala, after another day of bad news. I cannot even recall what calamity had just occurred; there are so many of them now. It was hard to spend an evening listening to writers insist on the power of books while the world was on fire. But the speaker that night was George Saunders. Saunders is a writer who has always written about the untenable surreality of modern life. His story collections, like CivilWarLand in Bad Decline and Tenth of December, and his novels, like Lincoln in the Bardo and this year’s Vigil, play with the realms of life and death, of meaning and sacrifice. In his speech, he talked about the science and mysticism of changing one’s mind, the miracle of free thought. It was a challenge to the sickly comfort of imagining apocalypses every day. So I knew I wanted to interview him for this newsletter.