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Humorist George Saunders has opened up about how he became a writer in a new piece in The New Yorker.

In the column, the author describes his life over the years from his early friendship with author Tobias Wolff and his Syracuse education to his early jobs as a technical writer and teacher. Here is an excerpt from the piece:

We’re not only allowed to think about audience, we’d better. What we’re doing in writing is not all that different from what we’ve been doing all our lives, i.e., using our personalities as a way of coping with life. Writing is about charm, about finding and accessing and honing ones’ particular charms. To say that “a light goes on” is not quite right—it’s more like: a fixture gets installed. Only many years later (see below) will the light go on.

Any collection by Saunders is a gem, but his latest book shows tremendous range and maturity. His scope, wild imagination, clarity, depth of feeling, and skewed sense of humor make the stories shine and linger. Amazing. Tenth of December is a masterpiece. Books mentioned in this post

While it was Saunders's Tenth of December that garnered all the attention, In Persuasion Nation is the book that is most representative of the Saunders experience. The stories show us a near future saturated in marketing and the tyranny of the brand, where scanners in the sidewalk attain consumer preferences and customize advertising accordingly, and [...]

You might think that eating at Chipotle Mexican Grill is a little bit low brow. But they want to change that. The fast food chain is now featuring original essays written by influential writers on its restaurant packaging. The author series is called “Cultivating Thought.” Jonathan Safran Foer curated the list of contributors. Participating writers will include:  Judd Apatow, Sheri Fink, Malcolm Gladwell, Bill Hader, Michael Lewis, Toni Morrison, Steve Pinker, George Saunders and Sarah Silverman. The pieces are all meant to be read in two minutes. The idea is to entertain people while they are scarfing down a burrito. Here is an excerpt from Malcolm Gladwell's Two-Minute Barn-Raising: I grew up in Canada, in an area of Ontario where there is a large community of Old-Order Mennonites. “Old Orders,” as they are known, are a religious group who live as if the 20th century never happened. They avoid electricity, drive horses and buggies, leave school at 16, and bail hay by hand. They dress in plain black and white, with straw hats over clean-shaven faces, and when a neighbor’s barn burns down, they gather as a community to put it back up. When I was little, not long after we moved to Ontario, my father heard about a barn-raising down the road. He decided to join in.

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When I was doing research for my novel REPLAY, which deals with near-death experience and reincarnation, I underwent hypnosis and past-life regression at a workshop with Dr. Brian Weiss, author of Many Lives, Many Masters: The True Story of a Prominent Psychiatrist, His Young Patient, and the Past-Life Therapy That Changed Both Their Lives.

The experience was amazing, cool, and a topic for another day. Or for a speech like the one I gave last week to a great group of librarians, explaining how that past-life regression was exactly like my memories of my childhood librarians. If you’re a great group of librarians, I’ll come tell you, too.

But the short version is that what I learned during that past-life regression is that it’s the feelings that endure. Not specific faces or long scenes with dialogue, but the feelings you experienced at various moments in any given life.

That’s why I love this beautiful little film dramatizing part of a speech by author George Saunders. As George points out, it’s our own kindness–or lack of kindness–that sticks with us in this life.

I think you’ll like it. Take a look:

We’ve collected the books debuting on Indiebound’s Indie Bestseller List for the week ending April 27, 2014–a sneak peek at the books everybody will be talking about next month.

(Debuted at #5 in Hardcover Fiction) The Serpent of Venice by Christopher Moore: “Venice, a long time ago. Three prominent Venetians await their most loathsome and foul dinner guest, the erstwhile envoy from the Queen of Britain: the rascal-Fool Pocket. This trio of cunning plotters—the merchant, Antonio; the senator, Montressor Brabantio; and the naval officer, Iago—have lured Pocket to a dark dungeon, promising an evening of sprits and debauchery with a rare Amontillado sherry and Brabantio’s beautiful daughter, Portia.” (April 2014)

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Bestselling author George Saunders has a new book out entitled, Congratulations, By The Way: Some Thoughts on Kindness.

The book is based on Saunders’ 2013 speech at Syracuse University’s graduation ceremony. In his talk, which went viral last year, Saunders talked about the importance of being kind in life. “What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness,” he said.

To promote the book, Random House teamed up with production company Above Average to produce a video using audio clips from the speech. We’ve embedded the video above for you to explore.

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I don’t read a lot of short stories. As whole I find them unsatisfying and would much rather sink my teeth into something longer. All though in saying that I am a massive convert to serial fiction where you get to read 100-200 pages of a continuous story every 3-4 months. There has been a lot of buzz about George Saunders’ latest collection of stories and after receiving a strong recommendation to give him a go I did exactly that.

The first story, Victory Lap, was amazing. The way Saunders got into the head of the three characters so quickly and fully was something to behold. It is a powerful and dark story, told very delicately, that really kicked off the collection well. Saunders followed this up with Sticks, a really shorty story consisting of only two paragraphs that again packed a punch that belied its size. My other favourites in the collection were Escape From Spiderhead, which is about an unusual experiment conducted on prisoners and the powerful The Semplica-Girl Diaries which lures you into some absolutely biting satire.

The writing is amazing but by the end of the collection my feelings about short stories bore true again. I felt unsatisfied and wanting more exploration of the ideas Saunders was bringing up and commenting on. As a writer I can see that he is a masterful storyteller, as reader I just wanted a bit more to sink my teeth into.

Buy the book here…

Author George Saunders has won the Story Prize, and its $20,000 purse, for his short story collection Tenth of December.

Saunders received the award at a ceremony at The New School in New York this week. Stephen Ennis, Director of the Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin; author Antonya Nelson, and Rob Spillman, Editor of literary magazine Tin House judged the competition.

This was the second time what Saunders was nominated for the award. His last collection, In Persuasion Nation was a finalist for the prize in 2007. Here is more from the press release:

Ten must surely be Mr. Saunders’ lucky number: He is the tenth winner of The Story Prize for a collection of ten stories called Tenth of December, that in 2013 spent ten consecutive weeks on The New York Times Best Sellers list for hardcover books. The book reached as high as no. 2 on that list, and the paperback edition has been on the trade fiction list for six weeks now.

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Amazon has revealed the bestselling books of 2012, a list led by Donna Tartt, Khaled Hosseini and David Finkel.

We’ve reprinted the top 10 books on the list below. Follow this link to see all 100. You can also check out the company’s top 100 lists for Literature & Fiction, Nonfiction, Digital Singles and Children’s Books for the year. Amazon also created a free Kindle eBook of the top books list if you’d like to read it on your device. continued…

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George Saunders fans have long been stalwart champions of his work, recommending CivilWarLand in Bad Decline and Pastoralia to anyone who would listen, pushing copies of In Persuasion Nation and The Braindead Megaphone into the hands of the unconverted. He's always had critical praise, from no less than Thomas Pynchon ("An astoundingly tuned voice — [...]

The Believer magazine and Los Angeles radio station KCRW have teamed up to produce The Organist, “a monthly experimental arts-and-culture program.”

You can listen to the first episode on SoundCloud or subscribe on iTunes.

The podcast includes Parks and Recreation star Nick Offerman, Scholastic editorial producer Amber Scorah, critic Greil Marcus and short story author George Saunders.
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