“The hype surrounding George Saunders’s Tenth of December in the early days of the calendar year was kind of staggering. The backlash followed not long afterwards, when it was suggested that someone who can’t seem to accrue enough pages to pen the Great American Novel couldn’t actually be considered the writer of our time. This makes me cringe — maybe because I’m beginning to suspect that it’s true.”
A long discussion of Tenth of December that includes George Saunders himself? Why, Rumpus Book Club, you’re too kind.
Counting down the days until Year in Reading begins? If not, we’d like you to remind that our contributors once included George Saunders.
Not many people know this, but I was once Ayn Rand’s lover. That’s right. The year was 1974. I was a fresh-faced seventeen-year-old, she was a prominent international author—and we were lovers. By ‘lovers’ I mean: we were constantly raping each other. Well, first there’d be a long speech. Usually by her. Then we’d gaze deeply at one another, and our souls would begin speaking the only language a man and a woman ever need: the language of mutual self-benefit. Each grasped, in the unflinching gaze of the other, a silent acknowledgment of the nobility of man, especially as manifested in work, the work that purified the soul the way steel is purified in the smelter. That sort of thing.
At The New Yorker’s website, George Saunders comes clean about his dark, Objectivist past.
George Saunders reads from Pastoralia
“Humor is what happens when we’re told the truth quicker and more directly than we’re used to.”
― George Saunders, The Braindead Megaphone
