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I first read George Saunders in 2007, not long after I graduated from college. I had spent a year juggling two gigs: an internship at an alternative newspaper, which paid me $300 per week, and shifts at a Starbucks, where my weekly compensation included a pound of coffee. The two jobs were in different cities, separated by the patchwork of Civil War battlefields my father had dragged me to as a kid. A few times each week, I drove past the place where Stonewall Jackson’s severed arm was buried. I was underslept and overcaffeinated, and my thoughts felt liminal and odd, flanked by corporate beverage jargon and sassy, imaginary headlines.
I’ve always felt like a serious person, but that year the feeling became difficult to square with the circumstances of my life. (I wore an apron.) On Sunday mornings, I’d open the coffee shop and bring an Americano to a retired guy who liked to read The Washington Post and gab with me about Big Events. I felt very remote from Big Events. The retired guy asked if I was still in school. I told him I had two degrees. “Why the hell are you working here?” he asked. I had no answer. The world didn’t care about my degrees; it hadn’t even noticed them.
I could still take books out of my college library, so I dropped by sometimes. During one visit, I found George Saunders’s In Persuasion Nation, a collection of short stories. The title story takes place in a universe populated by characters from television ads. One character, a polar bear, is violently killed for stealing Cheetos from an igloo—a scene the bear is doomed to repeat, per the logic of TV ads, on an infinite loop. The bear struggles to defy its fate; we sympathize with the bear, feel its sadness, and then witness the bear’s astonishing swell of compassion for its assailant, even as it succumbs again. This was a baffling universe, one whose rules and outcomes I still recognized from my own. Dignity and decency were important qualities in the face of oppressive power. To see those qualities vanquished didn’t diminish them; rather, it gave evil new depths, revealed the horrific potential of indifference.
CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, Saunders’s first collection, felt unavoidable to me, what with so many battlefields so near. An editor at the paper let me expense a copy from the local bookstore, for a story I wrote about lesser-known skirmishes in Virginia, which violence we choose to commemorate and which to forget. I was certain CivilWarLand held something I could quote in my story, some idea I could use. (During my research, I found a small plaque affixed to a Subway sandwich shop, identifying the location as the site of an 1864 battle—an odd collision of history, violence, memory, and commercialism in miniature. It felt very Saunders-y.) I didn’t manage to shoehorn Saunders into my story. But I inhaled the collection, and still thrill at the perfect final lines of the title story, in which an employee of a war-themed park is murdered, his spirit fleeing his body and passing through his assailant, “trying to change him, trying so hard, and feeling only hate and hate, solid as stone.”
Saunders’s early short stories were like theme parks—even the ones that weren’t literally set in theme parks. They were immersive miniature worlds with rigid rules; they pit symbolic, sometimes violent order against human complexity, to varying outcomes. Theme parks had made an impression on Saunders. “I still remember the baffled joy I felt on leaving the place,” Saunders once wrote of a childhood trip to Six Flags: “Wow, someone did this, someone made all this, some grown-up sat down and designed the little Mexican back alleys and cowboy boardwalks, the fake bird sounds.”
But that was all fiction. I wanted to know how Saunders functioned outside the park gates. I wanted him in my world, where the bird sounds were real.
Imagine my delight when, in the thrall of my fandom, I found The Braindead Megaphone, Saunders’s first and only nonfiction collection, at a local library sale. (My copy cost me 50 cents, and its title page features a stamp from the local library system, and another, in red, that reads “WITHDRAWN.”) The collection was heavy on short, satirical pieces, some of them from The New Yorker’s “Shouts and Murmurs” section. One was a hyperverbose letter from a dog to its owner, whose “member” he threatens to bite should the owner continue his “midnight kitchen gyration sans clothing.” None of which I loved, exactly.
But it also held his dispatches for GQ, which had the wisdom to make of Saunders a singular sort of travel writer: one whose Buddhist practice and efforts at compassion might be challenged by law enforcement practices at the US-Mexico border, or the decadence and class stratifications on display in Dubai, or even, possibly, a new Buddha himself, a teenager on a months-long meditation streak in Nepal. Each was a magnificent journal, self-deprecating and open. There’s no pretension of familiarity or deep expertise here: In each, Saunders is aware of the distance between himself and his subjects, registers his discomfort, strives to reduce his ignorance. I got more than my 50 cents’ worth.
These dispatches struck me as a reader; later, they struck me again as a writer and editor, someone who tries to participate in the world in order to report back to others. What is important to report back? Most of us are aware of a great suffering, which has been recklessly and unjustly apportioned. We are also aware that we contribute to that suffering, in various ways, often without knowing it. At the time these pieces were published, “empathy” wasn’t a literary buzzword, and nobody used the term “moral injury.” And yet each of these Saunders pieces—and several in the years since—have functioned as prompts, little nudges toward more expansive and compassionate thinking.
The New York Times Magazine recently noted that Saunders has “a public role as something close to a guru of goodness”—like a Jon Kabat-Zinn of the literary set. If you read Saunders, then you get it. But you also understand how impossible such a role is, and what our need for such a “guru” reveals about the world we share. It is, now and always, a world of Big Events, many of them horrific, done with malice. They test our mettle, our understanding of ourselves and each other.
Words only ever do so much. But, time and again, Saunders’s words—in his own stories, and in conversation—reveal their utility. They insist on our dignity, however and wherever they find us. And they help us extend the same dignity to others. To mark the publication of Vigil, his latest novel, I’ve rounded up the best of Saunders’s nonfiction writing, alongside a few memorable interviews.
The View from the South Side, 1970 (Granta, December 2009)
Theme parks have such tidy maps, colorful and direct, a spatial catalog of thrills and pleasures and risks. From the hilltop doorway of Jardine’s Restaurant, Saunders gives just such an overview of Oak Forest, Illinois. His short, lyric essay is a rich collection of miniature histories, the sort we all inherit from our hometowns and then tote around with us for a lifetime, their odd characters and locations beckoning our attention back for a closer look. Each line here launches its own potential story, any one of which Saunders might have followed in a piece of short fiction, taking the lead from his city and running with it. Instead, he steeps readers in a collective portrait of the Chicago suburb where he grew up.
Roses were there, clustered around fading Virgin Marys in crèches slightly askew. The Black Panthers were there, signalling secret meetings with African drums. The Nabisco plant was there, filling the night with the smell of vanilla. Lake Shore Drive was there, worrying me with its famous S-curve: When old enough to drive, would I be one of the dicks who drove into the lake?
Wide avenues of spreading oaks were there. Moss-covered park lagoons were there. Narrow gangways were there, smelling of wet brick. The Magikist Lips were there, always kissing. A decommissioned DC-9 sat atop a restaurant on Cicero, so working South-Siders with no hope of vacationing anywhere but the Dells could have the experience of eating on a plane.
What Gave You That Idea? (Starlee Kine, 99%Invisible, June 2012)
Starlee Kine, whose Mystery Show podcast remains a high-water mark for the medium, investigates the origins of the GEICO “cavemen” commercials, in which a group of Neanderthals takes offense at the auto insurance company’s short-lived slogan: “It’s so easy, a caveman could do it.” Their inspiration? A story from Saunders’s Pastoralia collection. Saunders is just a link in a long chain of artistic inspiration here, but his exchange with Kine reveals a surprising, pitch-perfect source of influence on his own stories: Charles Schulz’s Peanuts universe. Listening recommended.
Charlie Brown, “Peanuts” Christmas and Halloween shows were embarrassingly big in my childhood. I’d never seen anything that was quite so tonally complicated, but I felt a real direct line between the way I was feeling about things and the way my neighborhood looked and felt. For example, I would do a lot of “dreamy walking” around the neighborhood, and I really loved that. You’d see Linus doing that and it seemed to reassure you somehow that your experience is actually really sacred. It’s really valuable. Your neighborhood is really as important as any other place in the world. You know, part of the thing of influence is that we think there’s something in the world that intrudes on us and changes us. But the other way to see it is there’s something in us that finds a mirror. And then I think when you go to do some work, something in you rises to it.
My Writing Education: A Time Line (The New Yorker, October 2015)
Saunders claims he spent his graduate school years chasing a bad Hemingway impression, a trap that continues to ensnare susceptible young men. “Sometimes I did Babel, if Babel had lived in Texas,” he wrote later. “Sometimes I did Carver, if Carver had worked (as I had) in the oil fields of Sumatra. Sometimes I did Hemingway, if Hemingway had lived in Syracuse, which always ended up sounding, to me, like Carver.” At the time, Tobias Wolff, one of Saunders’s teachers, warned him: “Don’t lose the magic.” (Wolff later revisited the Saunders story that got him into grad school, for Hunger Mountain.) We live in the future, where Saunders’s touch feels singular. And so it’s remarkable to visit a younger, impressionable version of the writer, foolish but also earnest, unsure of himself but wholly in love with his teachers—not to mention Paula, the classmate he’d become engaged to after just a few weeks of knowing each other.
On a visit to Syracuse, I hear Toby saying goodbye to one of his sons. “Goodbye, dear,” he says.
I never forget this powerful man calling his son “dear.”
All kinds of windows fly open in my mind. It is powerful to call your son “dear,” it is powerful to feel that the world is dear, it is powerful to always strive to see everything as dear. Toby is a powerful man: in his physicality, in his experiences, in his charisma. But all that power has culminated in gentleness. It is as if that is the point of power: to allow one to access the higher registers of gentleness.
The Incredible Buddha Boy (GQ, May 2006)
An excellent marriage of author and subject. Saunders flies to Kathmandu then travels to the jungle near the Indian border to witness Ram Bomjon, a teenager in the midst of a months-long meditation and fast. Throughout, Saunders is attuned to his own physical discomfort, eating too many hot rolls on a flight, shivering through a frigid night outside Bomjon’s enclosure, weighing his own experiences against those of the child who, some say, might be the Buddha. He almost certainly wasn’t; Bomjon has had a number of problems with law enforcement in recent years, though Saunders couldn’t have anticipated that. The loss of mystique takes something from this story, and yet it remains a standout among Saunders’s travel pieces, a funny, wondrous dispatch from within the bounds of mystery. Notice, too, Saunders making moves like those in his Granta essay, trying to bring broad swathes of humanity into an intimate story.
It’s one thing to imagine seven months of nonmotion, but to see, in person, even ten minutes of such utter nonmotion is stunning. I think, Has he really been sitting like that since May? May? All through the London bombings, the Cairo bombings, the unmasking of Deep Throat, Katrina, the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, the Lynndie England trial, the Bali bombing, the Kashmir earthquake, the Paris riots, the White Sox World Series victory, the N.Y.C. transit strike, through every thought and purchase and self-recrimination of the entire Christmas season?
Suddenly, the question of his not eating seems almost beside the point.
CivilWarLand in Bad Decline: Preface (The Paris Review, January 2013)
“The stories are, I think, more cruel, more misshapen than they’d need to be, if that was the book’s simple intention,” Saunders wrote in later editions of his debut collection. “Sometimes the author seems to be rooting for the cruel world to go ahead and kick his characters’ asses.” A moving companion to “My Writing Education,” Saunders details the creation of his first book, pieced together during stolen time at his copywriting job in Rochester, New York. After enough hours at the photocopier, he had come to realize that decency did not guarantee salvation. “If life could be this harsh/grueling/boring for someone who’d had all the advantages,” he writes, “what must it be like for someone who hadn’t? A thread of connection went out between me and everyone else.”
At one point our second car broke and we couldn’t afford to replace it, so I started riding my bike the seven miles to and from work, along the Erie Canal. As winter approached, Paula put together an ad hoc winterproofing ensemble for me: a set of lab goggles, a rain poncho, some high rubber boots that, as I remember, had little spacemen on them. Biking along the canal I’d be composing in my head, and might arrive at work with a sentence or two all worked out. Then I’d dash through the atrium, into the men’s room, and try to get myself cleaned up, while not forgetting those sentences. Ah, those were the days.
But seriously: those were the days.
Biking back into town after dark, past the cozy colonial houses orange with firelight, I’d think: I have a home. I have people waiting for me, who love me. This is it. This is my life. These are the best years of my life.
George Saunders Has Written the Best Book You’ll Read This Year (Joel Lovell, The New York Times, January 2013)
Joel Lovell’s profile of Saunders felt, at the time, like a seismic event. Much of that is tied up in my own experiences. I was living in Brooklyn and working for a magazine, but desperate to leave both. I applied to graduate writing programs with an essay whose flashiest moment was, I felt, a Saunders move. I’d also loaned CivilWarLand to one of my wife’s friends, who never returned it. But no matter. Saunders was publishing a new collection, Tenth of December, and Lovell’s story proclaimed it the best book of 2013—and it was only January 3! This feels like the year the universe tipped its hat toward Saunders, the year his kindness won him a broader audience. His convocation address to Syracuse University went viral, eventually becoming a book of its own. Reading Saunders interviews can be nearly as gratifying as reading new work from the man himself; he seems generous and game, someone who shows up for his interlocutors. That’s true for his “Art of Fiction” interview with Benjamin Nugent, and certainly true of his time with Lovell.
“I saw the peculiar way America creeps up on you if you don’t have anything,” he told me. “It’s never rude. It’s just, Yes, you do have to work 14 hours. And yes, you do have to ride the bus home. You’re now the father of two and you will work in that cubicle or you will be dishonored. Suddenly the universe was laden with moral import, and I could intensely feel the limits of my own power. We didn’t have the money, and I could see that in order for me to get this much money, I would have to work for this many more years. It was all laid out in front of me, and suddenly absurdism wasn’t an intellectual abstraction, it was actually realism. You could see the way that wealth was begetting wealth, wealth was begetting comfort — and that the cumulative effect of an absence of wealth was the erosion of grace.”
A Letter to My Students as We Face the Pandemic (The New Yorker, April 2020)
Saunders publishes roughly once a year in The New Yorker, maybe more. Usually it’s a piece of short fiction. During the past decade, however, he’s gradually amassed a collection of nonfiction that resembles the mix of The Braindead Megaphone: thought experiments about partisan politics, a satirical gospel reading about “Little St. Don” and select members of the Trump administration, tributes to authors Grace Paley and E.L. Doctorow. There’s even a GQ-style dispatch from a series of Trump rallies, though that one feels shortsighted now, maybe even a little distracted. (As with the Buddha Boy, no one can perfectly see the path ahead.) But there’s nothing distracted about the note Saunders sent to his Syracuse University students as the COVID-19 pandemic set in. “There’s still work to be done, and now more than ever,” he writes—a call to attention that suits the political moment just as well. Aren’t these the moments Saunders’s writing has trained us for?
We are (and especially you are) the generation that is going to have to help us make sense of this and recover afterward. What new forms might you invent, to fictionalize an event like this, where all of the drama is happening in private, essentially? Are you keeping records of the e-mails and texts you’re getting, the thoughts you’re having, the way your hearts and minds are reacting to this strange new way of living? It’s all important. Fifty years from now, people the age you are now won’t believe this ever happened (or will do the sort of eye roll we all do when someone tells us something about some crazy thing that happened in 1970.) What will convince that future kid is what you are able to write about this, and what you’re able to write about it will depend on how much sharp attention you are paying now, and what records you keep.
Liner Notes for Jeff Tweedy’s WARM (The New Yorker, September 2018)
The best Saunders lines feel irreducible: cool, smooth stones you can squeeze in your hand without them squishing away or losing their shape. This piece—an introduction to a new set of songs by the Wilco bandleader, included with the album but reproduced by The New Yorker—is full of them, little declarations about what makes great art, or a poet, or tenderness. Saunders, long a musician himself, doesn’t overstate the power of a song: “It can open a person right up. It can jolt you out of some bullshit state of mind, of sloth, of hubris.” One could say the same about most of his writing, in any genre.
For a long time now, it seems to me, our culture has assumed that the function of art is to warn, to blame, to critique, to scoff, to dismiss. And those are some of its functions, for sure. But an art that only does those things is destructive. Destruction already being the dominant mode of our culture, we don’t need any more of it. Anyone who advocates “burning down the house” has likely never been inside a building on fire. By what do we really live? Our lives—our real lives—are made almost wholly of attempts at tenderness. We work hard on behalf of those we love, daydream about their future happiness, go out of our way to save them even the slightest pain, comfort them when the pain arrives just the same.
She Who Helps See (The Paris Review, March 2025)
We proceed into the world, most days, with a feeling we believe to be certainty. We know who we’ll encounter, what will generally happen, what we’ll make for dinner. We grow accustomed to our own thought patterns, and they determine what it is we notice. Saunders thrills at the loss of certainty, which allows for new sight. For The Greenhouse, a show of new botanical paintings by Inka Essenhigh, Saunders describes the “recalibration of my eye,” the ways in which Essenhigh’s work brings him to the boundaries of his senses. “What can briefly flummox the mind in its quest to reduce everything to a concept?” he writes. Another way of seeing, quietly and generously offered, perhaps by a story.
Many years ago, the first and only time I ever did acid, I looked down at my hands and noticed that they were not, in fact, “flesh-colored” after all, but contained dozens of colors: pinks and purples and reds and blacks, and many other shades I didn’t have names for.
Blessed by that experience, I’ve never looked at my own hands the same way again.
I connect my memories of my hands that day and Essenhigh’s work in this way: both are holy, sacramental, because they hint at the idea that I am, simultaneously, more than my perceptions and beautifully, permanently bounded by them.
Brendan Fitzgerald is a senior editor for Longreads. A former senior editor for Columbia Journalism Review, his writing has appeared in Smithsonian Magazine, Literary Hub, and The Morning News, where he wrote the “Press Pause” column.
Copyeditor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
