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George Saunders Review by Barry Didcock Now 62, George Saunders has spent a third of his life teaching creative writing at Syracuse University in New York state and for nearly three decades he has been turning out award-winning short story collections such as CivilWarLand In Bad Decline and Pastoralia. His skill and industriousness where these twin endeavours are concerned had already earned him a dot on America’s literary map by 2013, when he won the prestigious PEN award. But in 2017 that dot went from town- to metropolis-sized when, with his first long-form work, Lincoln In The Bardo, he won the Man Booker Prize. At the risk of over-stretching an already complaining metaphor, we’ve all now heard of Saundersville or George Town or whatever you want to call the place which is, as he puts it in this book about the craft of writing, his “iconic space” – the artistic terrain that is his and his only, and where his singular authorial voice resides.
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Every month, a deluge of new books comes flooding out from big publishers, indie houses, and self-publishing platforms. So every month, The A.V. Club narrows down the endless options to five of the books we’re most excited about.
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Image: NYRB Classics
The Leonora Carrington renaissance continues apace! In 2017, NYRB released the Surrealist painter and author’s memoir and Dorothy published her
Complete Stories. Now, before Carrington’s son Gabriel Weisz releases his own “memoir” about his mother later this year, NYRB returns with a reprint of her 1974 novel.
The Hearing Trumpet is difficult to synopsize but involves a 92-year-old woman whose family ships her off to an elder care facility. There, Carrington’s interests in absurdism, conspiracies, and Surrealism take over in a novel that Blake Butler describes as “