NP: Saunders//Lincoln

[Mark Thibodeau]

GS is an absolute master of the short story form, and I look forward
to anything he writes.

MT

On Tue, Feb 21, 2017 at 6:43 PM, John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com> wrote:
> I've heard good things about Lincoln in a roundabout way - namely that given
> how tight a writer GS is in short form, subjecting yourself to that much
> sustained all-killer-no-filler for a whole novel is quite exhausting. In a
> good way, like I say.
>
> On Wed, Feb 22, 2017 at 4:22 AM, Gary Webb <gwebb8686 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Thanks for the share. I loved Lincoln in the Bardo. Especially the
>> climax... for whatever reason, civilwarland in bad decline, both the story
>> and the book, resonated with me navigating dystopian corporate America,
>> a-and they read really well now... attached is his essay on Donald Trump and
>> his rallies, published in July. I've read a few of his interviews, after
>> Lincoln in Bardo was released, and I love his thoughts on election, etc. He
>> helps put things in perspective.
>>
>>
>> http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/11/george-saunders-goes-to-trump-rallies
>>
>> Sent from my iPhone
>>
>> On Feb 21, 2017, at 11:33 AM, Smoke Teff <smoketeff at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Whitehead's review in NYT is good:
>> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/09/books/review/lincoln-in-the-bardo-george-saunders.html?_r=0
>>
>> GS's accessibility (a lot of this is tonal/emotional accessibility) might
>> obscure his depth, precision, and genius. He has an astonishing amount of
>> singular talents: for story construction, for language, for vision--this
>> latter thing people I think have come to accept on the level of this
>> country//this moment, but the new book will, I think, expand this to the
>> scope of the world, history, the spirit.
>>
>> I think he gets discriminated against in the academy and to a lesser
>> extent the Serious Fiction Awards scene because he's so human and so
>> pleasurable. We don't know what to make of him. Our geniuses are supposed to
>> be harder, less funny, more serious/normal/austere (though he doesn't really
>> waste a syllable). Another reason: most of his work has come in the form of
>> short/medium-length stories (future dissertations will be written about his
>> uniquely minimalist/essentialist approach), when we mostly want novels to
>> mostly not read.
>>
>> In terms of ancestry, it's easy to identify some sci-fi and
>> dystopian/speculative type stuff. But go deeper. Think also/more of some
>> classic literary patron saints of the oppressed but resilient(ly loving)
>> spirit, and also (especially?) of the weird mystics. In his DNA I see Gogol
>> (every three years Saunders teaches a class called "The Russians" that
>> changes the life of everyone who gets the chance to take it), Babel,
>> Chekhov, Kafka, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Hemingway, Carver, O'Connor.
>> Couple others he'll mention a lot that some of you might not have on your
>> radar: Stuart Dybek (fellow south side of Chicago short story writer; cf.
>> "Hot Ice"), Barry Hannah.
>>
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Feb 21, 2017 at 10:15 AM, Jade Becker <jbecker13 at georgefox.edu>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> Thanks for the recommendation--I just picked up Tenth of December; I've
>>> heard a lot of good about Saunders.
>>>
>>> On Tue, Feb 21, 2017 at 7:59 AM, Smoke Teff <smoketeff at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Friends, I write to recommend GS's new (first pub'd) novel, Lincoln in
>>>> the Bardo. I had the privilege of learning from him and getting to know him
>>>> while he was working on this, so it's been on my horizon for a while, and it
>>>> was as impactful a read as I expected it to be. I believe it is great. Might
>>>> not jive with all tastes, or maybe it will. I read it in one sitting and
>>>> cried a great deal. I don't know how much of the American reading public has
>>>> or even how many of you have much of a taste for the kind of mysticism or
>>>> even religious thinking inside Contemporary Literary Fiction you might
>>>> extract from, say, a Pynchon. I think some people who have been paying
>>>> casual/medium attention to Saunders will be a little surprised to find it
>>>> here--which makes me wonder how it'll play with his fans. But if you like
>>>> his short stuff, and if you like Pynchon, I think you'll find plenty of
>>>> overlap (some obv. stylistic/thematic reasons to think of M&D along the
>>>> way).
>>>>
>>>> Curious to hear what any of you lot think about it.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>>
>>> Jade Becker
>>> (530) 518-6859
>>> George Fox University | Class of 2017
>>> Writing Consultant, George Fox University Academic Resource Center
>>> The Crescent, Editor-in-Chief
>>
>>
>
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l