Saunders' visit to DPU rescheduled to April 24

Monday, March 11, 2013
George Saunders

Hailed as "the writer for our time" in a New York Times Magazine piece, George Saunders will visit the campus of DePauw University on Wednesday, April 24 (rescheduled from March 13).

Saunders, deemed a "literary phenomenon" by Village Voice, will appear at 7:30 p.m. in Thompson Recital Hall, located within DePauw's Green Center for the Performing Arts.

Presented by the James and Marilou Kelly Writers Series, the event is free and open to the public.

Saunders' highly anticipated short-story collection, "Tenth of December," was released in early January.

In a piece headlined "George Saunders Has Written the Best Book You'll Read This Year," Joel Lovell wrote, "It's the trope of all tropes to say that a writer is 'the writer for our time.' Still, if we were to define 'our time' as a historical moment in which the country we live in is dropping bombs on people about whose lives we have the most abstracted and unnuanced ideas, and who have the most distorted notions of ours; or a time in which some of us are desperate simply for a job that would lead to the ability to purchase a few things that would make our kids happy and result in an uptick in self- and family esteem; or even just a time when a portion of the population occasionally feels scared out of its wits for reasons that are hard to name, or overcome with emotion when we see our children asleep, or happy when we risk revealing ourselves to someone and they respond with kindness -- if we define 'our time' in these ways, then George Saunders is the writer for our time."

Lovell noted, "His stories are set in what might be described as a just slightly futuristic America or, maybe better, present-day America, where, because of the exigencies of capitalism, things have gotten a little weird. These initial stories often take place in theme parks gone to seed or soul-withering exurban office strips, but the stories themselves are overflowing with vitality; they are sometimes very dark but they are also very, very funny."

Saunders is the author of three other story collections, "Pastoralia," "CivilWarLand in Bad Decline" and "In Persuasion Nation" as well as the novella-length illustrated fable, "The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil," the children's book, "The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip," and a book of essays, "The Braindead Megaphone."

His work appears regularly in the New Yorker, GQ and Harper's. Saunders teaches in the creative writing program at Syracuse University.

Comments
View 1 comment
Note: The nature of the Internet makes it impractical for our staff to review every comment. Please note that those who post comments on this website may do so using a screen name, which may or may not reflect a website user's actual name. Readers should be careful not to assign comments to real people who may have names similar to screen names. Refrain from obscenity in your comments, and to keep discussions civil, don't say anything in a way your grandmother would be ashamed to read.
Respond to this story

Posting a comment requires free registration: