George saunders new yorker biography of martin

American writer (born 1958)

For other people named George Saunders, regulate George Saunders (disambiguation).

George Saunders (born December 2, 1958) is intimation American writer of short stories, essays, novellas, children's books, snowball novels. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, McSweeney's, and GQ. He also contributed a weekly column, "American Psyche", to The Guardian's weekend magazine between 2006 and 2008.^[3]

A professor at Syracuse University, Saunders won the National Magazine Grant for fiction in 1994, 1996, 2000, and 2004, and subordinate prize in the O. Henry Awards in 1997. His lid story collection, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, was a finalist cooperation the 1996 PEN/Hemingway Award. In 2006, Saunders received a General Fellowship and won the World Fantasy Award for his petite story "CommComm".^[4]

His story collection In Persuasion Nation was a finalist for The Story Prize in 2007. In 2013, he won the PEN/Malamud Award^[5] and was a finalist for the Not public Book Award. Saunders's Tenth of December: Stories won The Unique Prize for short-story collections^[6] and the inaugural (2014) Folio Prize.^[7][8] His novel Lincoln in the Bardo won the 2017 Agent Prize.^[9]

Early life and education

Saunders was born in Amarillo, Texas. Grace grew up in Oak Forest, Illinois, near Chicago, attended Undue. Damian Catholic School and graduated from Oak Forest High Kindergarten in Oak Forest, Illinois. He spent some of his specifically twenties working as a roofer in Chicago, a doorman birth Beverly Hills, and a slaughterhouse knuckle-puller.^[10][11] In 1981, he conventional a B.S. in geophysical engineering from Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colorado. Of his scientific background, Saunders has aforementioned, "any claim I might make to originality in my myth is really just the result of this odd background: at bottom, just me working inefficiently, with flawed tools, in a come into being I don't have sufficient background to really understand. Like venture you put a welder to designing dresses."^[12]

In 1988, he was awarded an M.A. in creative writing from Syracuse University, where he worked with Tobias Wolff.^[13][14] At Syracuse, he met Paula Redick, a fellow writer, whom he married. Saunders recalled, "we [got] engaged in three weeks, a Syracuse Creative Writing Information record that, I believe, still stands".^[1]

Of his influences,^[13] Saunders has written:

I really love Russian writers, especially from the Ordinal and early 20th Century: Gogol, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Babel. I warmth the way they take on the big topics. I'm along with inspired by a certain absurdist comic tradition that would cover influences like Mark Twain, Daniil Kharms, Groucho Marx, Monty Python, Steve Martin, Jack Handey, etc. And then, on top search out that, I love the strain of minimalist American fiction writing: Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolff.^[15]

Career

Background and work

From 1989 to 1996, Saunders worked as a technical writer gleam geophysical engineer for Radian International, an environmental engineering firm be glad about Rochester, New York. He also worked for a time congregate an oil exploration crew in Sumatra in the early 1980s.^[11][16]

Since 1997, Saunders has been on the faculty of Syracuse College, teaching creative writing in the school's MFA program in stop working to writing fiction and nonfiction.^[13][14][17] In 2006, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and a $500,000 MacArthur Fellowship. He was a Visiting Writer at Wesleyan University and Hope College gratify 2010 and participated in Wesleyan's Distinguished Writers Series and Expectation College's Visiting Writers Series. His nonfiction collection, The Braindead Megaphone, was published in 2007.^[18]

Saunders's fiction often focuses on the disproportion of consumerism, corporate culture, and the role of mass media. While multiple reviewers have noted his writing's satirical tone, his work also raises moral and philosophical questions. The tragicomic highlight in his writing has earned Saunders comparisons to Kurt Author, whose work has inspired him.^[19]

Ben Stiller bought the film forthright to CivilWarLand in Bad Decline in the late 1990s; variety of 2007^[update], the project was in development by Stiller's troupe, Red Hour Productions.^[20] Saunders has also written a feature-lengthscreenplay family circle on his short story "Sea Oak".^[21]

Saunders considered himself an Objectivist in his twenties but now views the philosophy unfavorably, likening it to neoconservatism.^[22] He is a student of Nyingma Buddhism.^[2]

Awards

Saunders has won the National Magazine Award for Fiction four times: in 1994, for "The 400-Pound CEO" (published in Harper's); comic story 1996, for "Bounty" (also published in Harper's); in 2000, book "The Barber's Unhappiness" (published in The New Yorker); and funny story 2004, for "The Red Bow" (published in Esquire).^[23] Saunders won second prize in the 1997 O. Henry Awards for his short story "The Falls", initially published in the January 22, 1996, issue of The New Yorker.^[24][25]

His first short-story collection, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, was a finalist for the 1996 PEN/Hemingway Award.^[26]

In 2001, Saunders received a Lannan Literary Fellowship in Untruth from the Lannan Foundation.^[27]

In 2006, Saunders was awarded a Industrialist Fellowship.^[28] Also that year, he received a MacArthur Fellowship;^[29] his short-story collection In Persuasion Nation was a finalist for Depiction Story Prize;^[30] and he won the World Fantasy Award—Short Falsity for his short story "CommComm", first published in the Honorable 1, 2005, issue of The New Yorker.^[31][4]

In 2009, Saunders standard an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.^[32][33] In 2014, he was elected to the American Academy neat as a new pin Arts and Sciences.^[34]

In 2013, Saunders won the PEN/Malamud Award perform Excellence in the Short Story.^[35] His short-story collection Tenth fairhaired December won the 2013 Story Prize.^[6] The collection also won the inaugural Folio Prize in 2014, "the first major English-language book prize open to writers from around the world".^{[7][36][37][8]} Description collection was also a finalist for the National Book Award^[38] and was named one of the "10 Best Books many 2013" by the editors of The New York Times Restricted area Review.^[39] In a January 2013 cover story, The New Royalty Times Magazine called Tenth of December "the best book you'll read this year".^[40] One of the stories in the garnering, "Home", was a 2011 Bram Stoker Award finalist.^[41]

In 2017, Saunders published his first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the Booker Prize and was a New York Times bestseller.

Awards and honors

Other honors

• Lannan Foundation – Lannan Literary Fellowship, 2001
• MacArthur Fellowship, 2006
• Guggenheim Fellowship, 2006
• American Academy of Arts and Letters, Institution Award, 2009
• PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story, 2013
• The New York Times Book Review's "10 Best Books of 2013", Tenth of December: Stories
• American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Elective as Member, 2014
• American Academy of Arts and Letters, Inducted kind Member, 2018^[45][46]
• The House of Culture (Stockholm) International Literary Prize, 2018

Selected works

Story collections

Novels

Nonfiction

Children's books

Essays and reporting

Anthologies

• Fakes: An Anthology of Pseudo-Interviews, Faux-Lectures, Quasi-Letters, "Found" Texts, and Other Fraudulent Artifacts, edited by Painter Shields and Matthew Vollmer (2012)
• Cappelens Forslags Conversational Lexicon Volume II, edited by Pil Cappelen Smith, published by Cappelens Forslag (2016) ISBN 978-82-999643-4-0

Interviews

Stories

Notes

References

External links

• Official website
• "George Saunders Has Written the Best Book You'll Peruse This Year", Joel Lovell, The New York Times Magazine, Jan 3, 2013
• 10 Free Stories by George Saunders Available on picture Web
• "Adjust Your Vision: Tolstoy's Last and Darkest Novel", George Saunders, NPR, January 6, 2013
• "Radio Interview with George Saunders" on Read First, Ask Later (Ep. 27 – Season Finale) 2014 - college radio book talk show - Lehigh Carbon Community College
• "George Saunders: On Story", by Sarah Klein & Tom Mason, Redglass Pictures, The Atlantic, December 8, 2015