Tom's guest for the hour today is one of the most distinctive and fascinating voices in contemporary literature, whose new book is being published today. George Saunders won the 2017 Man Booker Prize for his novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, the acclaimed book that told a terrific story about a grieving Abraham Lincoln, with a wholly original approach to its structure and narrative arc.
Before the success of Lincoln, Saunders secured his reputation among the top rank of writers as a master of the short story. His 2013 collection, The Tenth of December, was a finalist for the National Book Award, and proclaimed one of the 10 best books of the decade by the New York Times Book Review.
In his last book, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, a non-fiction masterclass in analysis of Russian short stories, Saunders observed, “To write a story that works, that moves the reader, is difficult, and most of us can’t do it. Even among those who have done it, it mostly can’t be done.”
In his new book, Saunders proves, repeatedly, that in his hands, it absolutely can be done.
This collection of nine stories is called Liberation Day. The stories surprise and delight, and they challenge readers to abandon basic assumptions about reality and fantasy, and to re-imagine fundamental tenets of the short story form itself. These are stories that are not only thought-provoking; they create an occasion to understand the readers’ relationship to the writer in a different way.
George Saunders has been a guest on our show several times, and we're delighted to welcome him back to Midday to talk about this new collection.
He joins us on Zoom from New York.
