American · b. 1958
Man Booker Prize (2017), MacArthur Fellowship
George Saunders is an American fiction writer and MacArthur Fellow whose novel Lincoln in the Bardo won the Man Booker Prize and showcased his singular blend of compassion and formal invention.
George Saunders spent two decades writing short fiction — celebrated collections like CivilWarLand in Bad Decline and Tenth of December — before publishing his first novel, and the delay shows in the best possible way. Lincoln in the Bardo, published in 2017, is formally extraordinary: the story of Abraham Lincoln’s grief over the death of his son Willie, told partly through a chorus of ghosts inhabiting the Georgetown graveyard where the boy’s body lies, and partly through an invented compilation of historical sources — newspaper accounts, diaries, memoirs — about the night of Willie’s funeral. The novel won the Man Booker Prize and divided readers precisely because of its ambition.
Saunders has a rare gift for writing with both intelligence and warmth simultaneously, and Lincoln in the Bardo is his most fully realised expression of it. The ghosts — each defined by the unfinished business that keeps them trapped — are rendered with a specificity that makes the novel’s philosophical inquiry into death, loss, and continuity feel genuinely personal rather than conceptual. Lincoln himself is portrayed with great compassion, the private grief of a man managing impossible public weight.
The novel’s structure is its most challenging element: the chorus of ghost voices and the fragmented historical sources require readers to actively construct the narrative from multiple registers. Some readers find this exhilarating; others find it unnecessarily difficult. But Saunders’ humanism — his fundamental belief in the dignity and reality of every consciousness — gives the formal invention a grounding warmth that makes the book ultimately generous rather than cold.
by George Saunders
Seven Russian short stories by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol, with Saunders's line-by-line commentary on what each story is doing and why. Developed from his Syracuse MFA course, the book is a master class in how fiction creates meaning through moment-by-moment decisions of form.
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by George Saunders
Saunders's most celebrated story collection brings together ten pieces including the title story — a dying man and a boy converge on an icy pond — and 'Escape from Spiderhead.' Winner of the Story Prize, called 'the best book you'll read this year' by the New York Times. The best introduction to what Saunders does: satirical surfaces, genuine moral feeling, linguistic invention that earns its sentiment.
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by George Saunders
The title novella follows two employees of a cave-people theme park required to behave as prehistoric humans and file daily reports on each other's authenticity. Also includes 'Sea Oak,' in which a dead aunt returns to demand her family improve their lives, and 'The Falls.' Pastoralia is the darkest of Saunders's collections and the one most directly engaged with economic precarity.
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by George Saunders
Saunders's debut collection establishes his signature mode: corporate dystopia rendered in the language of the corporation itself, with genuine human feeling trying to survive inside systems designed to prevent it. The title story, set in a failing Civil War theme park besieged by gangs, demonstrates the absurdist logic at full stretch. Neither the title story nor the novella 'Bounty' has dated.
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by George Saunders
Stories including 'I CAN SPEAK!™' and 'Jon' take Saunders's corporate satire to its extreme: fiction that uses the language and logic of advertising to anatomise what advertising has done to human interiority. The most formally experimental of his collections.
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by George Saunders
On the night of Willie Lincoln's death in 1862, Abraham Lincoln visits his son's crypt as the dead in the Bardo surrounding it attempt to guide the boy to his next passage.
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Where to start with George Saunders — whether to begin with Tenth of December, Lincoln in the Bardo, or CivilWarLand in Bad Decline. A complete reading guide.
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George Saunders's novel of Abraham Lincoln grieving his dead son in a graveyard full of ghosts refusing to move on won the Booker Prize and redefined what a novel can be. These books share its formal experimentation, its tenderness toward the dead, and its belief that grief is political.
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