Saundersinalia

Can you believe it? On Saturday, November 6th, 2021, George Saunders will deliver the Mercantile Library’s thirty-third Niehoff Lecture.

The MacArthur Fellow and PEN/Malamud, Folio, and Booker Prize winner began collecting accolades in the early ’90s for stories published in The New Yorker, Harpers, and Esquire. The collections CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (1996) and Pastoralia (2001) grew his following from the tortured denizens of graduate writing programs to something approaching cult status. You know a writer has gone all “cult” when he shows up on Letterman, Colbert, or in conversation with Jeff Tweedy of Wilco. All that love has a lot to do with a knack noted by critics from Kakutani to McInerny for blending satire with sentiment. And it has everything to do with how funny he is. Saunders mines a vein of dark comedy familiar to readers of Mark Twain, Shirley Jackson, Kurt Vonnegut, Lorrie Moore, and Tobias Woolf, under whom he studied. But Saunders’ has a restless creativity, raw inventiveness, and a sense of the absurd that are entirely his own.

Add to those qualities, with the 2007 collection The Braindead Megaphone, mastery of the essay, of cultural and social observation.

If there’s one collection you might call the “Saunders gateway drug,” it’s Tenth of December. The 2013 release put him on Time’s list of “100 most influential people” where Mary Karr wrote of his work: “a stiff tonic for the vapid agony of contemporary living — great art from the greatest guy.”

And as we learned when Saunders finally got around to publishing a novel, he was just getting started. Colson Whitehead called the Man Booker Prize-winning Lincoln in the Bardo (2017) “a luminous feat of generosity and humanism.”

Despite his formidable literary powers, his myriad awards and accolades, Saunders comes off as this totally humble guy. Every sentence feels grounded in every lesson he’s learned along the way. There’s Saunders the student of life, of the art and craft of writing. There’s Saunders the teacher. Saunders the regular guy you could totally see yourself drinking a beer with.

That rare combination of humility and genius shines throughout A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life. His 2021 book is a crystallization of a class he’s taught at Syracuse for decades on Russian masters of the short story form. Coming during the pandemic, this book too is a well-timed tonic, a refreshing window into his intellect and creative process. And what a process it is.

So are we excited to put on our big person clothes to listen to one of our time’s finest writers? You bet. That it will be George Saunders at the Niehoff lectern as we come out of hiding will make this a special evening indeed.

-Cedric Rose

If aren’t familiar with Saunders, or would like to do a little remedial exploring, here are links to works available on the Mercantile’s online collection and out there on the Internet:

• Lincoln in the Bardo, the audiobook, performed by a celebrity all-star caste.
• Lincoln in the Bardo ebook.
• The moving, illustrated short story “Fox 8″
• A Swim in the Pond in the Rain, the audiobook, also with celebrity readings of the original Russian works
• A Swim in the Pond in the Rain, the ebook.

Out and about on the Internet:

• “A Lack of Order in the Floating Object Room” Northwest Review, 1986
• “The 400 Pound CEO” Harpers, 1993
• “I Can Speak” New Yorker, 1999
• “Sea Oak“ – Barcelona Review, 2000
• “Jon“ – New Yorker, January 2003
• “Bohemians“ – New Yorker, January 2004
• “Adams“ – New Yorker, August 2004
• “CommComm“ – New Yorker, August 2005
• His “American Psyche” column in The Guardian from 2006-2008
• “Puppy” – New Yorker, 2007
• “The Semplica-Girl Diaries ” – New Yorker, October 2012
• Tenth of December” – New Yorker, October 2011
• The Red Bow – Esquire, April 2009