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1 week ago | 
georgesaunders.substack.com | George Saunders
Q. Hi George,This question isn't directly relevant to my work, but something I've always wondered about the meta-craft of writing stories. How does one go about planning and organizing and writing stories in the context of a published collection? It feels like some writers will just bundle up the last 8-10 stories they've written and ship them out under a title, but others craft stories specifically with the larger thematic umbrella of a collection in mind.
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1 week ago | 
georgesaunders.substack.com | George Saunders
Thank you all for your insightful comments and special thanks to Peter for directing us to “The Prevention of Literature” by George Orwell, which I’d never read before and is full of power and relevance. And thanks to our beloved Mary G. for finding this gem – letters exchanged between two of our greatest short story writers, Katherine Anne Porter and Flannery O’Connor. (And it only now occurs to me that we’ve never done an O’Connor story here yet.
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2 weeks ago | 
georgesaunders.substack.com | George Saunders
So, I’m a little sick today, and hoping you won’t mind a short post to start off our discussion on “He,” which starts on pages 49 in The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter.
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3 weeks ago | 
georgesaunders.substack.com | George Saunders
Hi George,If I enumerated the ways Story Club has altered my life for the better, we'd be here all week—and I’ve got to save some energy to fight for democracy—so for now, I’ll just say thank you. My question is about time. Not in literature, but in life. I’m a playwright. In former incarnations, I was also (always) a "high achiever" type.
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3 weeks ago | 
georgesaunders.substack.com | George Saunders
From my 2023 short story collection, Liberation Day. Hope you enjoy it and feel free to share it widely.
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3 weeks ago | 
georgesaunders.substack.com | George Saunders
Hello everyone, take heart, for here we are together again/still. I recently had the pleasure of writing about the work of the wonderful artist Inka Essenhigh, whose new show, “The Greenhouse,” is at the Victoria Miro Gallery in London, March 14 - April 17. The Paris Review was kind enough to publish an excerpt this week.
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1 month ago | 
georgesaunders.substack.com | George Saunders
I published “A Swim in a Pond in the Rain” in 2021 and, at that point, suddenly, I seemed to be espousing a method. I’d get notes from people saying things like, “I’d love to see if your method can be applied to (name of story),” the implication (correct, by the way) being that not all stories worked by way of causality, escalation, specificity, etc. (The story named was often perceived to be of a more experimental, or gauzy, or language-based/plotless/dreamy type of story).
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1 month ago | 
georgesaunders.substack.com | George Saunders
Hi George,I hope this finds you well. As a Canadian neighbour, I’m hoping there are no tariffs on stories yet, but I expect them in the next wave (hur dur dur). I just wanted to say thank you for all you do for the art of storytelling. Your generosity and care is inspiring. Truly. How do you get out of the weeds? How do I know I’m in the weeds and not just, say, revising toward “story”? How do I know when something is turd I’m polishing and not just a dirty window I can’t yet see through?
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1 month ago | 
georgesaunders.substack.com | George Saunders
Lately I’ve been thinking about the idea of presence in fiction. By presence, I mean something two-pronged. First, presence within the fictive reality (as we try to vividly imagine it). Second, presence within the sentence itself (being freshly open to the potential of a given sentence). Share
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1 month ago | 
georgesaunders.substack.com | George Saunders
This week, I thought, as a way of gently closing out our discussion of “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” I’d just address a few of the questions some of you raised in the comments.
