A discussion of the mind of Abraham Lincoln, the art of creating historical voices, verbal improv and writing the afterlife.
Granta’s online editor Luke Neima talks to the writer George Saunders about his first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo. They discuss the mind of Abraham Lincoln during the civil war, the art of creating distinctive historical voices, verbal improv and writing the afterlife.
‘Art is the human mind fully operative.’
–George Saunders
‘The anglophone world, we have to infer, has run out of words for its own feelings.’
Daisy Hildyard on the wisdom of scarecrows.
‘What is the read receipt for?’
Lillian Fishman on texting, power and the ethics of leaving a friend on read.
‘Like pretty much everyone who uses the internet, I have seen many terrible things that I did not search for and that I cannot unsee.’
Rosanna McLaughlin on what the internet thinks she wants.
‘I have a pathological addiction to the internet, which I indulge with the excuse of making art. It rarely translates to anything good and mostly leaves me overstimulated and afraid.’
Paul Dalla Rosa on excess and the internet.
‘rumors of bees on speedwell, / no oxidative stress just / effortless pollination’
Two poems by Sylvia Legris.
‘The way I write in general is basically just to move, in as a quiet-minded a manner as I can, toward what I feel as heat.’
‘Must I deny my predilection, and marry, and doom myself to a certain, shall we say, dearth of fulfillment?’
‘One purpose of art is to get us to wake up, recalibrate our emotional life, get ourselves into proper relation to reality.’
George Saunders talks about allowing his characters access to goodness, why he avoids ‘auto-dark’ in his stories, and the death of David Foster Wallace.
‘The reader doesn’t need to have answers, but they do need to have theories.’
