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George Saunders (1) (1958–)

Autor(a) de Lincoln in the Bardo

Para outros autores com o nome George Saunders, ver a página de desambiguação.

44+ Works 19,777 Membros 839 Críticas 91 Favorited

About the Author

George Saunders is the author of CivilWarLand in Bad Decline and Pastoralia. (Publisher Provided) George Saunders was born in Amarillo, Texas on December 2, 1958. He received a bachelor's degree in geophysical engineering and a master's degree in creative writing from Syracuse University. He is a mostrar mais professor at Syracuse University and a writer of short stories, essays, novellas, and children's books. He won the National Magazine Award for fiction in 1994, 1996, 2000, and 2004 His books include CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, Pastoralia, The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip, The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, In Persuasion Nation, and Tenth of December: Stories, which won the inaugural Folio Prize in 2014. His debut novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, received the Man Booker Prize in 2017. (Bowker Author Biography) mostrar menos

Obras por George Saunders

Lincoln in the Bardo (2017) 5,577 exemplares
Tenth of December: Stories (2013) 3,714 exemplares
Pastoralia (2000) 2,323 exemplares
CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (1996) 1,979 exemplares
In Persuasion Nation (2006) 1,074 exemplares
The Braindead Megaphone (2007) 752 exemplares
Fox 8 {story} (2013) 567 exemplares
Liberation Day: Stories (2022) 433 exemplares

Associated Works

The Collected Stories (1994) — Introdução, algumas edições927 exemplares
My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead (2008) — Contribuidor — 753 exemplares
The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2006 (2006) — Contribuidor — 753 exemplares
The Book of Other People (2008) — Contribuidor — 729 exemplares
The Best American Short Stories 2005 (2005) — Contribuidor — 687 exemplares
The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2005 (2005) — Contribuidor — 614 exemplares
The Best American Short Stories 2008 (2008) — Contribuidor — 560 exemplares
The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2008 (2008) — Contribuidor — 460 exemplares
The Best American Short Stories 2012 (2012) — Contribuidor — 350 exemplares
The Best American Short Stories 2011 (2011) — Contribuidor — 337 exemplares
Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology (2006) — Contribuidor — 305 exemplares
The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2010 (2010) — Contribuidor — 298 exemplares
The Best American Short Stories 2013 (2013) — Contribuidor — 268 exemplares
100 Years of The Best American Short Stories (2015) — Contribuidor — 267 exemplares
The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories (2004) — Contribuidor — 258 exemplares
The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Seventeenth Annual Collection (2004) — Contribuidor — 234 exemplares
The Best American Travel Writing 2006 (2006) — Contribuidor — 205 exemplares
The New Granta Book of the American Short Story (2007) — Contribuidor — 205 exemplares
The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2012 (2012) — Contribuidor — 196 exemplares
The Secret History of Science Fiction (2009) — Contribuidor — 195 exemplares
McSweeney's Issue 4: Trying, Trying, Trying, Trying, Trying (2000) — Contribuidor — 163 exemplares
The Best American Travel Writing 2007 (2007) — Contribuidor — 158 exemplares
The Best of McSweeney's {complete} (1800) — Contribuidor — 138 exemplares
Granta 108: Chicago (2009) — Contribuidor — 134 exemplares
The Ecco Anthology of Contemporary American Short Fiction (2008) — Contribuidor — 122 exemplares
Prize Stories 2001: The O. Henry Awards (2001) — Contribuidor — 121 exemplares
The Best American Short Stories 2021 (2021) — Contribuidor — 119 exemplares
Burned Children of America (2001) — Contribuidor — 119 exemplares
Science Fiction: The Best of 2003 (2004) — Contribuidor — 118 exemplares
Invaders: 22 Tales from the Outer Limits of Literature (2016) — Contribuidor — 106 exemplares
Prize Stories 1997: The O. Henry Awards (1997) — Contribuidor — 94 exemplares
American Fantastic Tales: Boxed Set (2009) — Contribuidor — 91 exemplares
Fantasy: The Best of the Year, 2006 Edition (2006) — Contribuidor — 84 exemplares
The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2017 (2017) — Contribuidor — 82 exemplares
The Best American Magazine Writing 2004 (2004) — Contribuidor — 81 exemplares
The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2012 Edition (2013) — Contribuidor — 71 exemplares
Extreme Fiction: Fabulists and Formalists (2003) — Contribuidor — 51 exemplares
The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story (2021) — Contribuidor — 44 exemplares
The Best American Magazine Writing 2000 (2000) — Contribuidor — 26 exemplares
Escape: Stories of Getting Away (2002) — Contribuidor — 26 exemplares
The Best American Magazine Writing 2017 (2017) — Contribuidor — 23 exemplares
A Manner of Being: Writers on Their Mentors (2015) — Contribuidor — 12 exemplares

Etiquetado

2017 (94) a ler (2,279) Abraham Lincoln (134) Americano (254) antologia (1,154) Audiobook (105) autografado (150) Best American Series (123) colecção (160) Conto (110) contos (2,811) contos (202) e-livro (156) ensaios (443) Estados Unidos (135) Fantasia (287) Fantasma (144) Ficção (3,062) Ficção científica (223) Ficção histórica (294) Guerra civil (109) Humor (346) Kindle (157) lido (294) literary fiction (106) Literatura (278) Literatura dos Estados Unidos (345) Luto (104) McSweeney's (136) Morte (113) Não ficção (379) own (115) por ler (208) primeira edição (97) Romance (106) short fiction (166) Sátira (195) Século XXI (148) terror (105) Viagem (115)

Conhecimento Comum

Data de nascimento
1958-12-02
Sexo
male
Nacionalidade
USA
Local de nascimento
Amarillo, Texas, USA
Locais de residência
Amarillo, Texas, USA
Golden, Colorado, USA
Syracuse, New York, USA
Chicago, Illinois, USA
Rochester, New York, USA
Educação
Colorado School of Mines (B.S.|Geophysical Engineering)
Syracuse University (M.A.|Creative Writing)
Ocupações
geophysical engineer
technical writer
Organizações
Harvard Lampoon, Honorary Membership
Prémios e menções honrosas
MacArthur Fellowship (2006)
Guggenheim Fellowship (2006)
Harvard Lampoon Good American Satirist Award (2002)
Lannen Foundation Fellowship (2002)
Syracuse University Fellow (1986-1988)
O. Henry Award, Third Prize (1999) (for "Sea Oak", The New Yorker, December 28, 1998 & January 4, 1999) (mostrar todos 11)
O. Henry Award, Third Prize (1998) (for "Winky", The New Yorker, July 28, 1997)
O. Henry Award, Second Prize (1997) (for "The Falls", The New Yorker, January 22, 1996)
Syracuse University Graduate Teaching Award (2000)
Lannan Literary Fellowship (2001)
American Academy of Arts and Letters Academy Award (Literature, 2009)

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George Saunders (born December 2, 1958) is an American writer of short stories, essays, novellas, children's books, and novels. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, McSweeney's, and GQ. He also contributed a weekly column, American Psyche, to the weekend magazine of The Guardian between 2006 and 2008.

A professor at Syracuse University, Saunders won the National Magazine Award for fiction in 1994, 1996, 2000, and 2004, and second prize in the O. Henry Awards in 1997. His first story collection, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, was a finalist for the 1996 PEN/Hemingway Award. In 2006 Saunders received a MacArthur Fellowship. In 2006 he won the World Fantasy Award for his short story "CommComm".

His story collection In Persuasion Nation was a finalist for the Story Prize in 2007. In 2013, he won the PEN/Malamud Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Saunders's Tenth of December: Stories won the 2013 Story Prize for short-story collections and the inaugural (2014) Folio Prize. His novel Lincoln in the Bardo (Bloomsbury Publishing) won the 2017 Man Booker Prize.

Membros

Discussions

Happy sea creatures cling to fence singing at goats em Name that Book (Setembro 2014)

Críticas

Lovely, funny, sweet and sad. Sigh.
 
Assinalado
BookyMaven | 28 outras críticas | Dec 9, 2023 |
Lincoln in the Bardo is an odd book. Stylistically, the book is a work of art. It reads like a play and a collage of historical articles. George Saunders’s much-awaited first novel is certainly like a weird folk art diorama of a cemetery come to life as the New York Times put it. The dreamlike flow of Lincoln in the Bardo made the reading of it a little like taking some mildly hallucinogenic substance. But the story is a bit of a mess. But, perhaps that's the point? Life is a bit of a mess.

The characters, spirits suspended in the Bardo ( an intermediate, transitional, or liminal state between death and rebirth in Tibetan Buddhism) reside between “that” [this] world and their ultimate fate, spar with one another restlessly. A grieving and guilt-ridden Abraham Lincoln cannot bear to see his dear little son Willie, dead from typhoid fever, put away in the “sick box,” as the ghosts term coffins and sepulchers. He visits the cemetery alone, twice after his son’s interment in a temporary mausoleum, to commune with him, even going so far as to remove the lid of his coffin and holding the dead boy in his gangly arms. The boy’s spirit looks on and even enters his father’s body — He is not the only spirit to do so in the book. The community of souls in the Oak Hill Cemetery — and some from “outside the fence” — agitate to be freed from this waiting room between Earthly life and the next phase - the stage of rebirth. And while Lincoln in the Bardo features a wide cast of characters - the community of souls - it is the grief of Abraham Lincoln that anchors this book.

The supernatural chatter of our wide cast of characters can grow tedious at times — the novel could have used some editing — but their voices gain emotional momentum as the book progresses. And they lend the story a choral dimension that turns Lincoln’s personal grief into a meditation on the losses suffered by the nation during the Civil War, and the more universal heartbreak that is part of the human condition. Yet, all too often the vignettes are miniatures of the cruel, satirical stories that have won Saunders fans, and, as mentioned, several are poignant, but they don’t have much connection to Willie’s story. Because of this, the souls of the cemetery and the various stories connected to them often overshadow the crux of what makes this novel work: the pain of Abraham Lincoln's grief and his son trying to connect with him beyond the grave. You see it is Lincoln's very grief that is keeping Willie stuck in the Bardo. And Willie isn't ready to accept death.

Lincoln in the Bardo is an experimental novel that won the Man Booker prize in 2017. Its experimental nature is commendable but doesn't always work. The interplay of the frustrated few main spirits and the larger population resembled a stage script without stage directions (which was often frustrating); the dialogue is inventive, by turns poignant, tragic, eerie, bawdy, and mordantly funny. However, it often overshadows the main story. Excerpts from actual news stories, letters, and Lincoln biographies interweave with the spirits’ “lines,” lending authenticity to the historical context, that of the Civil War. However, some of these are also fabricated. The point is Saunders wants us to consider what is real and not real, what is truth, and what is fictional.

I found this book to be a poignant, sometimes funny, frustrating mess, sadistic (Saunders has a bad habit of describing cruel situations and graphic scenes), and often, too damn sentimental. Saunders isn't necessarily interested in history. He could care less that Lincoln's secret cause of emancipation wasn't really a personal emotion or conviction, but one more of policy and keeping the union intact. He wants you to think the Lincoln mind-melded with African-American spirits.

Great works of art are often controversial, imperfect, challenging specimens of ingenuity. This book is a demanding work of art, one with a unique yet frustrating voice. I'm glad to have read it but I'm not sure I want to revisit it.

*I recommend listening to the audiobook. Saunders friend Nick Offerman (Ron Swanson) agreed early in the production process of the audiobook to take a role, as did Offerman's wife, Megan Mullally. The two then recruited Julianne Moore, Don Cheadle, Rainn Wilson, and Susan Sarandon. Non-celebrities with parts include Saunders's wife, his children, and various of his friends. Other notable narrators include David Sedaris, Carrie Brownstein, Lena Dunham, Keegan-Michael Key, Miranda July, Ben Stiller, Bradley Whitford, Bill Hader, Mary Karr, Jeffrey Tambor, Kat Dennings, Jeff Tweedy, and Patrick Wilson.
… (mais)
 
Assinalado
ryantlaferney87 | 317 outras críticas | Dec 8, 2023 |
Some funny thoughtful essays on our culture. I liked the forward to Huck Finn, the eponymous essay is good, the Dubai essay fine. Some of them were too cute for me. Too much trying satirism.
 
Assinalado
BookyMaven | 18 outras críticas | Dec 6, 2023 |
Entertaining short stories. A cutting cynical edge, but mostly retaining some affection for its cast of hapless delusional losers. Mostly. A touch of misanthropy creeps through at times.

There's some very bad parenting here, mostly in the past of our sad chumps. Many of the stories take place in the near future, with small but significant technological advances - though progress is rarely seen to be for the better.

The last, eponymous story is the stand-out - eschewing the future gazing, it's a sad simple story of despair and redemption.

Recommended, especially for those in need of some bleak laughs in the darkness.
… (mais)
 
Assinalado
thisisstephenbetts | 178 outras críticas | Nov 25, 2023 |

Listas

Ghosts (1)
Reiny (1)
to get (1)
2021 (1)

Prémios

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Associated Authors

Nick Offerman Narrator
David Sedaris Narrator
Anton Chekhov Contributor
Nikolai Gogol Contributor
Leo Tolstoy Contributor
Ivan Turgenev Contributor
Lane Smith Illustrator
Mary Karr Narrator
Bill Hader Narrator
Lena Dunham Narrator
Haspard Dughet Cover artist
Kat Dennings Narrator
Ben Stiller Narrator
John Pye Cover artist
Don Cheadle Narrator
Chelsea Cardinal Cover designer
E. Webb Cover artist
Harm Damsma Translator
Joel Lovell Foreword
Niek Miedema Translator
Keith David Narrator
Glenn Close Narrator
BD Wong Narrator
Rainn Wilson Narrator

Estatísticas

Obras
44
Also by
53
Membros
19,777
Popularidade
#1,096
Avaliação
3.9
Críticas
839
ISBN
283
Línguas
20
Marcado como favorito
91

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