He wrote a book-length lecture, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, which gets into the mechanics and ethics of reading. He published his first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, which contains a thousand or so little chapters. It’s no surprise, then, that the past decade has been a period of restlessness for him. A teacher of mine once told me that if I wrote only one short story in my entire life and it was as good as ‘ CommComm,’ it would be an enviable career. The end of that period contains works of impossible perfection. He seemed to have cracked a sort of code, allowing him to write from somewhere beyond enlightenment with a kind of deathbed gravity while still feeding off the drab plastic minutiae of daily life. You might see George Saunders’s first four books of short stories as a whole life’s creative growth compressed into a dozen years: discovering voice, developing characters, settling into themes, and guiding the reading experience.
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