A Google search for “the best book this year” brings up George Saunders, an acclaimed author who will visit The College of William & Mary this Thursday.
Saunders will give a talk at 7 p.m. in room 101 of Andrews Hall. His appearance is part of the Patrick Hayes Writers Series, which invites contemporary authors from all genres to share their work and experience.
Saunders is renowned for his six collections of short stories and novellas and his nonfiction essays. His most recent work, “Tenth of December: Stories,” was reviewed by Joel Lovell for The New York Times Magazine with the headline, “George Saunders Has Written the Best Book You’ll Read This Year.”
He’s been similarly lauded by his contemporaries, including Joshua Ferris, the late David Foster Wallace and Pulitzer Prize winner Junot Diaz, who said, “There’s no one who has a better eye for the absurd and dehumanizing parameters of our current culture of capital. But then the other side is how the cool rigor of his fiction is counterbalanced by this enormous compassion. Just how capacious his moral vision is sometimes gets lost, because few people cut as hard or deep as Saunders does.”
Saunders took an unconventional path to writing, graduating from the Colorado School of Mines with a bachelor’s degree in geophysical engineering in 1981. Memoirist Tobias Wolff, then a professor at Syracuse University, lobbied for Saunders’ admittance in the Master’s of Fine Arts program.
Saunders told The Missouri Review in 2001 that he didn’t enter the program with the same knowledge of great authors as his peers. “But fiction is open to whoever comes in the door, as long as you come in energetically, and so I had a feeling there was room for me,” he said.
Even after graduating with his M.F.A. in 1988, Saunders worked as a technical writer and geophysical engineer, working at one point with an oil exploration crew in Sumatra. His first work of fiction, “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline,” was published in 1996 and since then, he’s been on the faculty at Syracuse University.
In 2006, he received both a $500,000 MacArthur Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He’s a four-time winner of the National Magazine Award, and a second prize-winner in the 1997 O. Henry Awards honoring short stories. “Tenth of December” is currently ranked second on the New York Times’ fiction best-seller list.
