Why George Saunders Needs to Stop Repeating Himself Tenth of December, by George Saunders Owners of a subscription to The New Yorker also tend to own a sizable stack of unread New Yorkers. And what often separates the issues that get read from the ones that gather in the basket next to the coffee table is a quick glance down the contents page. There are certain marquee names. If, for example, there’s a new essay by David Sedaris, the odds of the issue making it into a gym bag rise exponentially. Among readers of contemporary fiction, George Saunders is often included in such lists. Part of the problem involves scope—specifically, Saunders’s proclivity for focusing on his characters’ cognition. Here, Saunders achieves the “contradictory swirl of energy” that enables Alison’s circumstances and motives to unfold in a natural and engaging way, which is why the story is so good. Which he does. In “Victory Lap,” Alison Pope suddenly asks herself, “Was she special?
[Fiction] | Loyalty, by Charles Baxter As much as I love her, I blame Astrid. Astrid told my wife, Corinne, that she could achieve happiness if only she’d leave me. It sounded simple. I stood in the driveway. Holding on to my son, I walked into the garage. Astrid thought that happiness was within poor Corinne’s grasp, and she said so, day after day. Corinne had been bitching about me, to me, and the topics were, I don’t know, the usual. But I loved her, and she left me. The minute Corinne was gone, Astrid showed up. She was competent and assured with child rearing, calm in the face of infant tantrums. New toys appeared. You are currently viewing this article as a guest.
‘Tenth of December,’ by George Saunders I love how this makes Saunders sound like a nervous explorer, crossing thin ice to reach a distant smoldering volcano. The land of the short story! But it also captures something fundamental about his own brutal, jokey stories, which for all of their linguistic invention and anarchic glee are held together by a strict understanding of the form and its requirements. Take plot. And “Tenth of December” is very dark indeed, particularly in its consideration of class and power. Yet despite the dirty surrealism and cleareyed despair, “Tenth of December” never succumbs to depression. This “vast existential nausea” is Saunders in a nutshell. Kazuo Ishiguro - Wikipedia English author Sir Kazuo Ishiguro OBE FRSA FRSL (; born 8 November 1954) is a British novelist, screenwriter, musician, and short-story writer. He was born in Nagasaki, Japan, and moved to Britain in 1960 when he was five. In 2017, the Swedish Academy awarded Ishiguro the Nobel Prize in Literature, describing him in its citation as a writer "who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world".[1] Early life[edit] Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, Japan, on 8 November 1954, the son of Shizuo Ishiguro, a physical oceanographer, and his wife, Shizuko.[2] At the age of five,[3] Ishiguro and his family left Japan and moved to Guildford, Surrey, as his father was invited for research at the National Institute of Oceanography (now the National Oceanography Centre).[2][4][5] He did not return to visit Japan until 1989, nearly 30 years later, when he was a participant in the Japan Foundation Short-Term Visitors' Program. Awards[edit]
Why George Saunders (or anyone else) can write whatever they damn well please | Books | For Our Consideration The backlash had to begin sometime. George Saunders’ fourth short-story collection, Tenth Of December, landed on the New York Times Bestseller list in its first week after garnering significant praise, and even a lengthy, glowing New York Times Magazine profile. Saunders is unusual among anointed writers because his major works are all story collections. He’s never published a novel. The premise of the Gawker piece is that any writer should want to write a novel. This isn’t so hard to believe. The Pulitzer Prize is the highest award for an American fiction author. It is possible to achieve the highest honors in the field without writing a novel. Chen’s shakiest point in his column is his claim, “the novel is the Super Bowl of fiction writing, and any fiction writer who hasn’t written one is going to be relegated to runner-up in the annals of literary history.” Chen’s patronizing tone makes it seem as though Saunders is wasting his time without working on The Big One.
About Her and the Memories That Belong to Her | Mieko Kawakami | Granta Magazine Translated from Japanese by Hitomi Yoshio If we think of our memories as having a shape, then one possibility is that they come in the shape of a box. I know that this is not entirely an original idea, but that doesn’t make it untrue. After all, we are born with more or less ordinary faces and bodies, deal with ordinary problems, share them with other ordinary people who come and go in our lives and eventually die. So I should feel no shame in imagining an ordinary box in which our memories are enclosed. And so it happened that one day a box was delivered to me. I don’t know why I decided to attend the reunion in my rural home town, where there was not a single person I wanted to see or remember, no one I had anything to say to. It could have been that I was curious, or that I happened to have time on my hands. These were the thoughts I toyed with as I set off one Saturday in late April just before the holidays, taking the bullet train to the town whose name I had long forgotten. ‘Now?
George Saunders Short Story - The Red Bow NEXT NIGHT, walking out where it happened, I found her little red bow. I brought it in, threw it down on the table, said: My God my God. Take a good look at it and also I'm looking at it, said Uncle Matt. First thing of course was to find the dogs. Well we lit up the debris and then shot the three of them as they ran out. But that Mrs. Jim Elliott said he would put Sadie down himself and borrowed my gun to do it, and did it, then looked me in the eye and said he was sorry for our loss, and Evan Bates said he couldn't do it, and would I? Around midnight we found the fourth one gnawing at itself back of Bourne's place, and Bourne came out and held the flashlight as we put it down and helped us load it into the wheelbarrow alongside Sadie and Muskerdoo, our plan being--Dr. When we had the fourth in the wheelbarrow my Jason said: Mr. Well no I don't believe so, said Bourne. But she is mostly an outside dog? She is almost completely an outside dog, he said. Well, ah . . . said Bourne. Say what?
Where Have All the Sundays Gone? - Words Without Borders I was lying in bed when I learned of the novelist's death. Awaking from a long dream filled only with incoherent darkness, my mind was still a blur as I reached out for my iPhone next to the pillow to check the time. As my eyes rested on the little screen, I found the news in the Top Stories section. It was a single sentence made up of tiny characters. I understood the words but couldn't quite grasp the meaning. I tried saying aloud "Hmmm"—then again, "So he died." The novelist had apparently been in treatment for some time. It was early evening when I finally got out of bed. I owned every book the novelist had written. I set the timer on the rice cooker and sat down on the sofa, glancing at the bookshelf to see which one of his books I would hold in my hands. I was down to the last teabag. "Yeah, it's pretty good." We were classmates in high school. From that point on, Amamiya would lend me books by the novelist whose name I had only heard of. Today was Tuesday. Two o’clock came.
The Falls--George Saunders (1958-____ ) The Falls by George Saunders (b.1958) Approximate Word Count: 3801 Morse found it nerve-racking to cross the St. Jude grounds just as the school was being dismissed, because he felt that if he smiled at the uniformed Catholic children they might think he was a wacko or pervert and if he didn't smile they might think he was an old grouch made bitter by the world, which surely, he felt, by certain yardsticks, he was. Morse was tall and thin and as gray and sepulchral as a church about to be condemned. From behind him on the path came a series of arrhythmic whacking steps. Cummings bobbed past the restored gristmill, pleased at having so decisively snubbed Morse, a smug member of the power elite in the conspiratorial Village, one of the league of oppressive oppressors who wouldn't know the lot of the struggling artist if the lot of the struggling artist came up with great and beleaguered dignity and bit him on the polyester ass. Boy, oh boy, could life be a torture. Morse began to run.
“As You Would Have Told It to Me (Sort Of) If We Had Known Each Other Before You Died” | The New Yorker Audio: Jonas Hassen Khemiri reads. I remember that it was fall. And that it was a weekend. And that I was sitting at home drinking apple juice and half watching a rerun of a debate program. Around lunchtime the doorbell rang. The police stormed in; the hall was filled with uniforms. In the elevator down I stopped resisting. The red-haired policeman led me to a patrol car. The policeman, who until now had looked indifferent, suddenly got a little smile on his lips. The “policeman” opened the door to the back seat. I imagined that we would start with a champagne picnic. I waited in the back seat of the patrol car. After the park we do that thing I heard a colleague saying on the phone that her sister had to do for her bachelorette party. Next stop: the recording studio, where I have to do the thing that my dentist told me his son got for a bachelor-party present—record a song for my future wife. And it really did. After the interrogation I was taken to my “cell.” But I remember you.
George Saunders on writing, empathy and 'Tenth of December' George Saunders via video chat (Screenshot ) George Saunders' short story collection "Tenth of December" is receiving high praise, and topping bestseller lists. That's despite the fact that according to most everyone in publishing, short story collections don't sell. I didn't. Instead, in this interview, Saunders talks about writing and about empathy; about channeling the play-acting of his Chicago-area childhood to inhabit the vernacular of a particular character; buzzkills and Los Angeles when it was a bummer; and the way he finds constraints to be productive. Saunders, a creative writing professor at Syracuse University, enjoys teaching. He told us a little bit about his writing cohort that the New Yorker identified in 1999 as "20 under 40," all of whom have helped shape contemporary fiction (nonfiction, too). Saunders also talked a little bit about the writers that preceded him, including Russians, and why being uncomfortable can be good for us as we get older, and as we make art.
Charles Baxter (author) Charles Baxter (born May 13, 1947) is an American novelist, essayist, and poet. Baxter was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to John and Mary Barber (Eaton) Baxter. He graduated from Macalester College in Saint Paul. Baxter taught high school in Pinconning, Michigan for a year before beginning his university teaching career at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot (2007). Imaginary Paintings (1989)The South Dakota Guidebook (1974)Chameleon (1970) A William Maxwell Portrait: Memories and Appreciations (2004)Bringing the Devil to His Knees: The Craft of Fiction and the Writing Life (2001)Best New American Voices 2001 (2001)The Business of Memory (1999) Greasley, Philip A. (2001).
The Faery Handbag | Small Beer Press by Kelly Link Fri 1 Jul 2005 - Filed under: Free Stuff to Read, Short Stories | 14 Comments "The Faery Handbag" was originally published in the anthology The Faery Reel. I used to go to thrift stores with my friends. We’d take the train into Boston, and go to The Garment District, which is this huge vintage clothing warehouse. Everything is arranged by color, and somehow that makes all of the clothes beautiful. We had this theory that you could learn how to tell, just by feeling, what color something was. One time we were looking through kid’s t-shirts and we found a Muppets t-shirt that had belonged to Natalie in third grade. Maybe you’re wondering what a guy like Jake is doing in The Garment District with a bunch of girls. We had this theory that things have life cycles, the way that people do. Down in the basement at the Garment Factory they sell clothing and beat-up suitcases and teacups by the pound. The faery handbag: It’s huge and black and kind of hairy. Fairies live inside it.
“The Lost Troop” Audio: Will Mackin reads. We had a dry spell in Logar. It was December and the weather was dog shit, so a degree of slowness was expected. But this went beyond slowness. I thought of the Japanese soldiers on Iwo Jima, who, when their island fell to the Americans, didn’t know that it had fallen. I wondered if, one night, we’d drop out of the starry sky in our blacked-out helicopters and land near a walled compound in the desert. But, as far as we knew, it wasn’t. “Come on,” Hal would say. He’d be standing in the middle of the room. One night, Digger spoke up: “Who remembers that graveyard decorated like a used-car lot, out in Khost?” I raised my hand, along with a few others. “I think we might need to go back there,” Digger said. The graveyard in question was on the northern rim of a dusty crater. Digger, who’d been closer to the graveyard than I was, thought that the graves had looked suspicious. “Good enough for me,” Hal said. Joe, our interpreter, was right there to scold me. “How far?”