And so I checked in with myself. Was I doing okay, this far into a pandemic?
Yes. I’m okay. I’m taking this time as a hibernation period of sorts. I’m not putting my foot on the gas work-wise; instead, I’m keeping up a normal level of work and filling my days with cats and baking and meditation and books and working on my finances. And while there are often times when I’m seething with the frustrating sameness of these days, life has been good overall.
A lot of my travel friends have been struggling with not traveling lately. So many of them, in fact, that I wondered if I was a freak for not feeling that way myself. How much did travel actually mean to me if I barely noticed that four months had passed without me even leaving the city limits?
Tickets include an exclusive signed copy of A Swim in a Pond in the Rain while supplies last! Copies will begin shipping on January 12, when the book is published. Note, this event will be a one-time-only, live, interactive virtual experience, not to be re-aired.
Part hilarious prophet, part tender interpreter of the human condition, Booker Prize winner George Saunders (Lincoln in the Bardo) has been called the only writer who predicted 2020. His tales, which generally are not like anything anyone has written before (The Atlantic), mix razor-sharp absurdism with a huge heart. They re routinely celebrated with headlines like George Saunders has written the best book you ll read this year (that was the New York Times on Tenth of December in 2013) or a luminous feat of generosity and humanism (Colson Whitehead on Lincoln in the Bardo in 2016). Or, as Khaled Hosseini put it, Saunders makes you feel like you re reading fiction for the first time.