George Saunders Has Written the Best Book You’ll Read This Year
NY Times excerpt
For people who pay close attention to the state of American fiction,
he has become a kind of superhero. His stories now appear regularly
in The New Yorker, he has been anthologized all over the place, and
he has won a bunch of awards, among them a “genius grant” in 2006
from the MacArthur Foundation, which described him as a “highly imaginative
author [who] continues to influence a generation of young writers and
brings to contemporary American fiction a sense of humor, pathos and
literary style all his own.” As Joshua Ferris recently wrote in an introduction
for the reissue last fall, in e-book form, of “CivilWarLand”: “Part of the
reason it’s so hard to talk about him is the shared acknowledgment among
writers that Saunders is somehow a little more than just a writer. . . .
[He] writes like something of a saint. He seems in touch with some better
being.”
It is true that if there exists a “writer’s writer,” Saunders is the guy.
“There is really no one like him,” Lorrie Moore wrote. “He is an original
— but everyone knows that.”
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| George Saunders Profile Page Wikipedia |