#George Saunders

[explore-blog]

Every well-thought-out rebuttal to dogma, every scrap of intelligent logic, every absurdist reduction of some bullying stance is the antidote. Every request for the clarification of the vague, every poke at smug banality, every pen stroke in a document under revision is the antidote… We still have the ability to rise up… keep reminding ourselves that representations of the world are never the world itself.

George Saunders on storytelling and the antidote to media manipulation.

[quotespile]

I am not too tired. I'm just not ready. The surge of pride and life and self is still too strong in me. But I will get there. I will. I will write it yet. Only I must not wait too long.

George Saunders, Liberation Day

[tranquilstudy]

October 15 /24

We’re halfway through October. That’s damn crazy.

Recently, a habit I’ve wanted to get into is to really enjoy what I’ve been reading. I feel like life is so bustling around and so much constant work that it’s tough to truly savour anything. So, I’ve been setting aside some time, maybe once a week or a couple times a week, to give myself a couple hours and really sink into a book. The last book I read, “A Swim in a Pond in the Rain” by George Saunders, was fantastic. Absolutely devoured it, his voice is so passionate and yet so critical. I loved every second, and it made it very easy to get back into this habit.

QOTD: what is one event or experience that has changed your perspective of life?

🎧 : comedown — parcels

📖: “the ocean at the end of the lane” — Neil Gaiman

[sivavakkiyar]

Fox 8, by George Saunders

[wordshaveteeth]

The stories we’re reading here are among the best their authors ever wrote. But these authors also wrote lesser ones, and it’s important to read those too, if only to remind ourselves that nobody hits it out of the park every time, and that a masterpiece might have three or four test runs behind it, in which the artist was working some things out.

- George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Masterclass on Writing, Reading and Life

[power-chords]

LOL

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

The marble not yet carved can hold the form of every thought the greatest artist has. ” - Michelangelo

+

“Every soul is vast and wants to express itself fully. If it’s denied an adequate instrument (and we’re all denied that, at birth, some more than others), out comes…poetry, i.e., truth forced out through a restricted opening. That’s all poetry is, really: something odd, coming out. Normal speech, overflowed. A failed attempt to do justice to the world. The poet proves that language is inadequate by throwing herself at the fence of language and being bound by it. Poetry is the resultant bulging of the fence.” ― George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life

[thekidyouforgot]

I just want to say that history, when it arrives, may not look as you expect, based on the reading of history books. Things in there are always so clear. One knows exactly what one would have done.

George Saunders, Love Letter

[cinematic-literature]

You Hurt My Feelings (2023) by Nicole Holofcener

Book title

To Paradise (2022) by Hanya Yanagihara

I Had to Tell It by Beth Mitchell

A Swim In The Pond In The Rain (2021) by George Saunders

Moon Witch, Spider King (2022) by Marlon James

On Freedom - Four Songs of Care and Constraint (2021) by Maggie Nelson

[queenoftheferns]

I want to be a better writer so I started analyzing some books I like to see what makes them so good- taking a paragraph out of the book and studying the word choice and sentence structure- and you know what I found every. single. time?

it’s poetry. you can always tell that a good writer is very often a poet as well. the creative ways of describing things just out of reach? poetry. the way paragraphs flow better when each sentence has alternating amounts of syllables? that’s a poetry thing. George Saunders in his book “A Swim in a Pond in the Rain” said that (i’m paraphrasing here) language is limited and it’s like there’s this fence in between what we can describe with words and the deeper parts of the human experience that we don’t have the language for but long to express anyway. the writer throws themself against that fence, trying to break it, and fails. But that bulge in the fence that gives you just a taste of the other side? that’s what poetry is.

And, at its best I think fiction can be that as well. We tell stories and we slip in and out of that fence and wink and nudge our way to those wordless parts of humanity.

All this to say, I come from a family of poets and generally wasn’t interested in reading or writing it because it seemed to mystical and hard to understand. But now I’m realizing that to be a good creative writer I’m going to need to develop the tools of a poet as well, or at the very least read some poetry. And tbh i resent that

[strvngevsvngels]

Me, the boys, and a cold one

[quotespile]

Doubt will fester as long as we live. And when one occasion of doubt has been addressed, another and then another will arise in its place.

George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo

[aaronsrpgs]

book I finished / book I started

[mostlyghostie]

A just finished commission- this one happens to feature a couple of my absolute favourites!

[wordshaveteeth]

That’s how characters get made: we export fragments of ourselves, then give those fragments pants and a hairstyle and a hometown and all of that.

- George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Masterclass on Writing, Reading and Life

[fenzs-strikes-again]