George Saunders (1) (1958–)
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Om författaren
George Saunders is the author of CivilWarLand in Bad Decline and Pastoralia. (Publisher Provided) George Saunders was born in Amarillo, Texas on December 2, 1958. He received a bachelor's degree in geophysical engineering and a master's degree in creative writing from Syracuse University. He is a visa mer professor at Syracuse University and a writer of short stories, essays, novellas, and children's books. He won the National Magazine Award for fiction in 1994, 1996, 2000, and 2004 His books include CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, Pastoralia, The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip, The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, In Persuasion Nation, and Tenth of December: Stories, which won the inaugural Folio Prize in 2014. His debut novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, received the Man Booker Prize in 2017. (Bowker Author Biography) visa färre
Verk av George Saunders
A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life (2021) 1,113 exemplar
Escape from Spiderhead {story} 9 exemplar
Sea Oak 4 exemplar
My Chivalric Fiasco 2 exemplar
Commcomm 2 exemplar
Jon 2 exemplar
Adams 2 exemplar
The Red Bow 2 exemplar
Puppy [short story] 2 exemplar
Winky (in Pastoralia) 2 exemplar
Le cascate (in Pastoralia) 1 exemplar
Le ragazze Semplica (in Dieci dicembre) 1 exemplar
Il parrucchiere infelice (in Pastoralia) 1 exemplar
La fine del firpo nel mondo 1 exemplar
Love Letter 1 exemplar
Al Roosten (in Dieci dicembre) 1 exemplar
Esortazione (in Dieci dicembre) 1 exemplar
Croci (in Dieci dicembre) 1 exemplar
Giro d'onore (in Dieci dicembre) 1 exemplar
93990 {short story} 1 exemplar
Bohemians [short story] 1 exemplar
Liner Notes 1 exemplar
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Taggad
Allmänna fakta
- Födelsedag
- 1958-12-02
- Kön
- male
- Nationalitet
- USA
- Födelseort
- Amarillo, Texas, USA
- Bostadsorter
- Amarillo, Texas, USA
Golden, Colorado, USA
Syracuse, New York, USA
Chicago, Illinois, USA
Rochester, New York, USA - Utbildning
- Colorado School of Mines (B.S.|Geophysical Engineering)
Syracuse University (M.A.|Creative Writing) - Yrken
- geophysical engineer
technical writer - Organisationer
- Harvard Lampoon, Honorary Membership
- Priser och utmärkelser
- MacArthur Fellowship (2006)
Guggenheim Fellowship (2006)
Harvard Lampoon Good American Satirist Award (2002)
Lannen Foundation Fellowship (2002)
Syracuse University Fellow (1986-1988)
O. Henry Award, Third Prize (1999) (for "Sea Oak", The New Yorker, December 28, 1998 & January 4, 1999) (visa alla 11)
O. Henry Award, Third Prize (1998) (for "Winky", The New Yorker, July 28, 1997)
O. Henry Award, Second Prize (1997) (for "The Falls", The New Yorker, January 22, 1996)
Syracuse University Graduate Teaching Award (2000)
Lannan Literary Fellowship (2001)
American Academy of Arts and Letters Academy Award (Literature, 2009) - Kort biografi
- George Saunders (born December 2, 1958) is an American writer of short stories, essays, novellas, children's books, and novels. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, McSweeney's, and GQ. He also contributed a weekly column, American Psyche, to the weekend magazine of The Guardian between 2006 and 2008.
A professor at Syracuse University, Saunders won the National Magazine Award for fiction in 1994, 1996, 2000, and 2004, and second prize in the O. Henry Awards in 1997. His first story collection, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, was a finalist for the 1996 PEN/Hemingway Award. In 2006 Saunders received a MacArthur Fellowship. In 2006 he won the World Fantasy Award for his short story "CommComm".
His story collection In Persuasion Nation was a finalist for the Story Prize in 2007. In 2013, he won the PEN/Malamud Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Saunders's Tenth of December: Stories won the 2013 Story Prize for short-story collections and the inaugural (2014) Folio Prize. His novel Lincoln in the Bardo (Bloomsbury Publishing) won the 2017 Man Booker Prize.
Medlemmar
Diskussioner
Happy sea creatures cling to fence singing at goats i Name that Book (september 2014)
Recensioner
Some funny thoughtful essays on our culture. I liked the forward to Huck Finn, the eponymous essay is good, the Dubai essay fine. Some of them were too cute for me. Too much trying satirism.
Entertaining short stories. A cutting cynical edge, but mostly retaining some affection for its cast of hapless delusional losers. Mostly. A touch of misanthropy creeps through at times.
There's some very bad parenting here, mostly in the past of our sad chumps. Many of the stories take place in the near future, with small but significant technological advances - though progress is rarely seen to be for the better.
The last, eponymous story is the stand-out - eschewing the future gazing, it's a sad simple story of despair and redemption.
Recommended, especially for those in need of some bleak laughs in the darkness.… (mer)
There's some very bad parenting here, mostly in the past of our sad chumps. Many of the stories take place in the near future, with small but significant technological advances - though progress is rarely seen to be for the better.
The last, eponymous story is the stand-out - eschewing the future gazing, it's a sad simple story of despair and redemption.
Recommended, especially for those in need of some bleak laughs in the darkness.… (mer)
The weirdest, most genre-bending thing I've ever read, and I absolutely loved it.
Listor
Magic Realism (1)
Dead narrators (1)
Backlisted (1)
Ghosts (1)
Booker Prize (1)
Best Dystopias (1)
Phoebe Bridgers (2)
To Read (2)
Reiny (1)
2000s decade (1)
Five star books (1)
Read This Next (1)
100 New Classics (1)
to get (1)
2021 (1)
Review 4 (1)
First Novels (1)
Reading 2022 (1)
Priser
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Associerade författare
Statistik
- Verk
- 44
- Även av
- 53
- Medlemmar
- 19,772
- Popularitet
- #1,096
- Betyg
- 3.9
- Recensioner
- 838
- ISBN
- 283
- Språk
- 20
- Favoritmärkt
- 91
The characters, spirits suspended in the Bardo ( an intermediate, transitional, or liminal state between death and rebirth in Tibetan Buddhism) reside between “that” [this] world and their ultimate fate, spar with one another restlessly. A grieving and guilt-ridden Abraham Lincoln cannot bear to see his dear little son Willie, dead from typhoid fever, put away in the “sick box,” as the ghosts term coffins and sepulchers. He visits the cemetery alone, twice after his son’s interment in a temporary mausoleum, to commune with him, even going so far as to remove the lid of his coffin and holding the dead boy in his gangly arms. The boy’s spirit looks on and even enters his father’s body — He is not the only spirit to do so in the book. The community of souls in the Oak Hill Cemetery — and some from “outside the fence” — agitate to be freed from this waiting room between Earthly life and the next phase - the stage of rebirth. And while Lincoln in the Bardo features a wide cast of characters - the community of souls - it is the grief of Abraham Lincoln that anchors this book.
The supernatural chatter of our wide cast of characters can grow tedious at times — the novel could have used some editing — but their voices gain emotional momentum as the book progresses. And they lend the story a choral dimension that turns Lincoln’s personal grief into a meditation on the losses suffered by the nation during the Civil War, and the more universal heartbreak that is part of the human condition. Yet, all too often the vignettes are miniatures of the cruel, satirical stories that have won Saunders fans, and, as mentioned, several are poignant, but they don’t have much connection to Willie’s story. Because of this, the souls of the cemetery and the various stories connected to them often overshadow the crux of what makes this novel work: the pain of Abraham Lincoln's grief and his son trying to connect with him beyond the grave. You see it is Lincoln's very grief that is keeping Willie stuck in the Bardo. And Willie isn't ready to accept death.
Lincoln in the Bardo is an experimental novel that won the Man Booker prize in 2017. Its experimental nature is commendable but doesn't always work. The interplay of the frustrated few main spirits and the larger population resembled a stage script without stage directions (which was often frustrating); the dialogue is inventive, by turns poignant, tragic, eerie, bawdy, and mordantly funny. However, it often overshadows the main story. Excerpts from actual news stories, letters, and Lincoln biographies interweave with the spirits’ “lines,” lending authenticity to the historical context, that of the Civil War. However, some of these are also fabricated. The point is Saunders wants us to consider what is real and not real, what is truth, and what is fictional.
I found this book to be a poignant, sometimes funny, frustrating mess, sadistic (Saunders has a bad habit of describing cruel situations and graphic scenes), and often, too damn sentimental. Saunders isn't necessarily interested in history. He could care less that Lincoln's secret cause of emancipation wasn't really a personal emotion or conviction, but one more of policy and keeping the union intact. He wants you to think the Lincoln mind-melded with African-American spirits.
Great works of art are often controversial, imperfect, challenging specimens of ingenuity. This book is a demanding work of art, one with a unique yet frustrating voice. I'm glad to have read it but I'm not sure I want to revisit it.
*I recommend listening to the audiobook. Saunders friend Nick Offerman (Ron Swanson) agreed early in the production process of the audiobook to take a role, as did Offerman's wife, Megan Mullally. The two then recruited Julianne Moore, Don Cheadle, Rainn Wilson, and Susan Sarandon. Non-celebrities with parts include Saunders's wife, his children, and various of his friends. Other notable narrators include David Sedaris, Carrie Brownstein, Lena Dunham, Keegan-Michael Key, Miranda July, Ben Stiller, Bradley Whitford, Bill Hader, Mary Karr, Jeffrey Tambor, Kat Dennings, Jeff Tweedy, and Patrick Wilson.… (mer)