Stories, as much as we like to talk about them, retrospectively, as emanations of theme or worldview or intention, occur primarily as technical objects when they're being written. Or at least they do for me. They're the result of thousands of decisions made at speed during revision.
George SaundersI'm very happy - if I can do even a little bit of work to get the short story out more, I'm thrilled.
George SaundersYou can see a whole book as a series of creating an expectation and then delivering a skew on that expectation so it's not totally satisfied.
George SaundersOne of the sad things about this political season is that it allows [requires] us to get behind our big "Liberal" or "Conservative" banner and forget, for a time, that the big problems in our country have been around a long time and have been batted back and forth, caused and exacerbated, by both sides, and are more spiritual or ethical than [merely] political.
George Saunders