I take that Raymond Pettibon postcard with me wherever I'm writing. GQ Style: Are there things you have to have with you when you write? George Saunders: Not really. On the pages that follow, Saunders describes how he gets his writing done and shows us the relics and totems he surrounded himself with while making this book.- Daniel Riley We'll call it a thing you should read this spring. (Think about the toys in Toy Story when Andy leaves the room-that's sort of what you're getting, only with talk ranging from the bitching of winos to metaphysical inquiry.) Overall, it is one of the strangest books of mainstream fiction around, competing only with some of Saunders's own story collection for unbridled inventiveness. It is also stupidly funny and philosophically transcendent. It is a sustained chorus on life, death, and Lincoln father and son. The Lincoln in this bardo, then, is the newly departed Willie-but also Abe, who leaves the White House to visit his son's body during the night. The oral history in this case comprises the voices of over a hundred ghosts living in a liminal sort of purgatory, a pre-Judgment in-between the Buddhist tradition calls the bardo. Here's a shot: Lincoln in the Bardo is a fictitious (mostly) oral history of the night President Lincoln's 11-year-old son, Willie, was interred. It'll be a fun parlor game to watch critics attempt to outdo themselves describing what this thing is. L incoln in the Bardo is George Saunders's first novel, but Saunders being Saunders, that designation is sort of useless-nothing in this book resembles any novel you've ever read before.

Novel lincoln in the bardo