George Saunders is the author of five collections of short stories and novellas and is professor of creative writing at Syracuse University. Between 2006 and 2008 he wrote a column in the Guardian called American Psyche. His first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo – a fictionalised account of the death of Abraham Lincoln’s 11-year-old son Willie – was awarded the Man Booker prize 2017. It is released in paperback by Bloomsbury on 8 February.
1. Opera
The Exterminating Angel
We saw this at the Met and it was a magical, transporting experience, almost like it was coming out of my own mind. We came out two hours later and it felt like no time at all had passed. In preparation we watched the Buñuel movie it’s based on, and the opera was a textbook example of how you do an adaptation beautifully. Sometimes you go to the opera and you think you’re going to a museum, seeing this thing that used to be current, but in this case it felt so new. I think Thomas Adès, the composer, is a genius.
2. Film
Battle of the Sexes
This is the story of the Bobby Riggs and Billie Jean King game. I thought it was an amazing bit of narrative: the way the two storylines run in parallel and then cross at exactly the right moment – in a lot of my stories I do a similar thing. It was really entertaining: I love how it managed to get both the incredible weirdness of the 70s and the simplicity of the time as well. And it also did a beautiful job with the romance between King and her first female lover [Marilyn Barnett].
3. Live
Leo Kottke
He’s a legendary solo guitarist and his music was really important to me when I was young. I was a working-class person, sort of stumbling into the idea that I might want to be an artist someday, and his music really spoke to me. To hear him play live is an amazing experience: it sounds like there are four people playing. And it’s a real education in the idea that you can’t be virtuosic without being precise: you might want to be flashy but before that you have to be disciplined.
4. Place
Monterey, California
We lived in upstate New York all of our adult lives, and about two years ago we moved out to California for half the year. It just so happened that we moved into Steinbeck country, near Monterey. So we’ve been casually doing a little greatest Steinbeck hits tour, going around his different houses and places where his books were set, like Cannery Row or Tortilla Flat. I’ve been doing a lot of that, to reconnect with him and his books. It’s a fun way to spend a weekend.
5. Fiction
The Complete Works of Shakespeare
This is my reading project for the new year: to read all the plays in order. I’m putting all other reading aside. I got hold of this newish copy and I’ve been working through it. I’m not even at the good plays yet – I’m up to Henry VI, Part One – but it’s been so invigorating. I’m trying to figure out how to mimic the way he could get so many people in a play so fully realised, and I’m learning some tricks. I won’t say what they are, but my thought is that if I read all these I’ll absorb some fundamental lesson.
6. Album
Lemonade – Beyoncé
I was late to this, but I discovered it last year and now I’m addicted. The mix of music and visuals and poetry and politics has really gotten under my skin. I’m drawn to certain cultural products because I can feel them affect and change my artistic approach, and I feel like every time I watch the DVD I learn something. I can’t articulate what that is, but it’s almost like it’s clarifying my vision of what’s beautiful. It’s really something new and special.
7. Nonfiction
Stamped from the Beginning by Ibram X Kendi
I finished this before Christmas and it really has kind of changed my way of thinking. The subtitle is The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. It’s a big, 600-page academic history of what racism is and how it started and how it’s been propagated over the years, and it’s mind-blowing. It’s not passionate, it’s very, very factual, and for a white person especially it gives you some great tools with which to continue to exterminate your own racism. So I recommend that one pretty highly.
