{"id":20768,"date":"2025-07-24T15:00:12","date_gmt":"2025-07-24T15:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/20768\/"},"modified":"2025-07-24T15:00:12","modified_gmt":"2025-07-24T15:00:12","slug":"george-saunders-announces-new-book-vigil","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/20768\/","title":{"rendered":"George Saunders Announces New Book, \u2018Vigil\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Prepare to reenter the bardo or something like it: George Saunders is releasing a new novel that takes place in another liminal zone between life and death. Vigil, which Random House will publish on January 27, 2026, follows the deathbed journey and moral accounting of oil company CEO K.J. Boone. He is ferried to the afterlife by Jill \u201cDoll\u201d Blaine, who has been ushering the newly dead to their next destination since her own demise in the \u201970s. \u201cAs Boone races toward death, visitors (worldly and otherworldly, alive and dead) arrive, clamoring for a reckoning,\u201d per the novel\u2019s jacket copy.<\/p>\n

Vigil and Lincoln in the Bardo, Saunders\u2019s 2017 novel about the death of Abraham Lincoln\u2019s young son, can be described as companion pieces, according to the author. \u201cAnd there\u2019s a third on the way (I think, I hope),\u201d he said in an email to Vulture. \u201cThe afterlife in the two books are a little different \u2014 different rules apply \u2014 but I feel like I\u2019m using \u2018what comes next\u2019 to understand with more precision what\u2019s happening now.\u201d The novel came to be because he found himself wondering \u201cabout that generation of climate-change deniers who, through obfuscation and spin, put progress on hold for 20 or 30 years, and are now old and passing away. I wondered whether such a person might, at the end of his life, feel inclined to repentance. If he had a chance to explain himself, would he try? Could he even do it?\u201d<\/p>\n

The novel, he hopes, approaches a political topic without restricting itself to an expression of opinion. \u201cIt\u2019s like Chekhov said \u2014 art doesn\u2019t have to solve a problem, it just has to formulate it correctly,\u201d Saunders says. \u201cSo instead of saying, \u2018Here, world, here\u2019s my fully formed opinion,\u2019 you end up taking yourself on a little trip in the direction of more complexity, more ambiguity, a deeper understanding. In this sense, the product is even more political, because it\u2019s charged, not only with opinion (possibly anger), but also with some sympathy.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Saunders, a former MacArthur and Guggenheim fellow, winner of the Booker Prize, prolific Substacker<\/a>, and best-selling favorite of Barack Obama and Dua Lipa, has published many books, including short-story collections, novellas, and one children\u2019s picture book; this will be his 13th. And he did it without his writing shed<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Prepare to reenter the bardo or something like it: George Saunders is releasing a new novel that takes…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":20769,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[353,49,48,75,17530,44,17531,5256],"class_list":{"0":"post-20768","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-canada","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-george-saunders","13":"tag-news","14":"tag-vigil","15":"tag-vulture-homepage-lede"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20768","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20768"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20768\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20769"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20768"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20768"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20768"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}