Saunders and a full cast narrate ‘Liberation Day’

George Saunders has been an award-winning writer for the past three decades. He’s published stories, essays, children’s books and novels, with his work appearing in such publications as The New Yorker, Harper’s and McSweeney’s.

His novel “Lincoln in the Bardo” won the 2017 Booker Prize.

His new collection of short stories is titled “Liberation Day,” the audiobook version of which features a full cast including Saunders himself along with Tina Fey , Michael McKean and Jenny Slate among others.

Of the print version, New York Times reviewer Colin Barrett wrote, “ ‘Liberation Day’ is a spiky, at times difficult collection, seldom providing the reader with much in the way of catharsis. But these are stories worth reading, the best of them as thought-provoking and resonant as a fan of Saunders might expect.”

To hear Saunders in conversation with Audible Editor Aaron Schwartz, click here .

A few choice comments from the interview:

On narrating his own work: “I think when I was a kid in Chicago, if you weren’t athletic, which I wasn’t, and you weren’t, you know, real cool, which I wasn’t, one way you could get some cred is by doing voices, like imitating a teacher, kind of in that George Carlin, Richard Pryor vein, you know? So that’s something I was pretty good at as a kid. And for me, the big aha moment as a writer was when I went, ‘Oh, that’s writing, that’s exactly the same thing.’ You make up a person, you assign her a voice, and then you go to town, you do improv, basically, and then, what we do, you’re allowed to edit your improv.”

On the discipline of writing unlikable characters: “I treat fiction as kind of almost like self-training. Like, if you put a person in a story that you don’t like and then you say, ‘Well, I’m going to spend eight months with you,’ you might not like them at the end, but you’re going to be seeing them in more detail. Which I think is a form of, or at least it’s a potential way to develop affection for somebody.”

On Tina Fey’s contribution to “Liberation Day”: “(S)he reads a story called ‘The Mom of Bold Action.’ And what she does there that really kind of stunned me was she – I mean, I like that character a lot, I do. But the way Tina read her, the story corners so tightly and you feel so much empathy for that woman, and then when she kind of, not to give it away, but she does some things that aren’t the greatest, you feel disappointed in her and you still feel affection for her. I think that she takes you on a really wild ride, that was, to my listening, it was what was in the story, but more, you know, because of her genius.”

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