George Saunders will be appearing at Pittsburgh Arts and Lectures as part of the “Ten Evening Series” at the Carnegie Music Hall on September 14th, 2026 at 7:30P.M.
American fiction writer George Saunders is the author of thirteen books, three of which—Pastoralia, Tenth of December, and Lincoln in the Bardo—were chosen for the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the 2017 Man Booker Prize, is a profound investigation of love, mourning, and what’s left undone in the lives and afterlives of Abraham Lincoln, his deceased son Willy, and a remarkable chorus of ghostly compatriots. A 2006 MacArthur (“Genius”) Award winner, Saunders was included in Time’s list of the one hundred most influential people in the world. His 2013 graduation address to Syracuse University, where he is a faculty member in creative writing, was published as Congratulations, By the Way and has been viewed nearly half a million times on YouTube.
I wanted to speak with Saunders because I’ve long found his fiction—his short stories, especially—wild, funny, and entirely sui generis: inventive and incisive yet nourished in every sentence by what’s always seemed to me a deep well of respect for readers’ attention and dignity. Satire bites, the saying goes, but Saunders has long seemed more inclined to substitute curiosity and empathy for derision and ridicule. Saunders stories care for you as they teach you and teach you while you laugh. They’re trenchant, life-affirming, hilarious, and wise. Saunders’s most recent novel, Vigil, is set at the deathbed of aging oil tycoon K.J. Boone.
I spoke to Saunders on Monday, August 24th,, 2026. The following transcript is lightly edited for concision and clarity.
Chris Warren
We’re really looking forward to hosting you here in Pittsburgh. Have you been to Pittsburgh before?
George Saunders
I think I’ve done two things there, and I just remember the best audiences–really well curated and alert. And they laugh. I also see you have a Chicago area code.
Chris Warren
That’s right!
George Saunders
Yeah, I remember that one.
Chris Warren
You’re a South-sider!
George Saunders
Yeah, you?
Chris Warren
Well, I got my cell phone when I moved to the South Side from overseas in about 2007.
George Saunders
Well, so the big question is White Sox or Cubs. You don’t have to answer. I know it’s an ecumenical–
Chris Warren
Well, White Sox, obviously.
George Saunders
There you go. Okay, all right. Thank you. Now we can proceed.
Chris Warren
Well, one other, quick point. My friend and colleague Tony Swofford says hello.
George Saunders
Oh, tell him hi. Oh, that’s wonderful. Good, yeah, he’s a great guy, great writer.
Chris Warren
Yeah. He said to ask you about the Metallica of Finland.
George Saunders
Yeah. Oh, I think that’s a Russia- yeah, we were in Russia together. And I’m trying to think. That reference isn’t coming alive for me. Did he tell you any more about it?
Chris Warren
It was something about dancing in a mosh pit in St. Petersburg?
George Saunders
Oh God, yes, that’s coming back to me now. That’s right. Yeah, we had a good long dance. And I think my daughter was there too. And I seem to remember he got mugged like three times or something in a very short period. I don’t know. Maybe confusing that a little, but you could ask him about that.
Chris Warren
I will, I will. I know you’re coming to talk about your new book, Vigil, and I should just say that I’m an enormous fan. And so, this is a real pleasure for me to just kind of get to speak with you. And I’m also more of a literary critic and historian, and, you know, frankly, pretty new to interviewing authors. So apologies if my questions end up kind of askew.
George Saunders
No, that’s great.
Chris Warren
So here at Carnegie Mellon, which is where the Pittsburgh Review of Books is based, there’s a lot of focus on techne in the sense of technical engineering knowledge. And, you know, I’m fascinated by your early training and early career, and I wonder how you think about the connections between your training as a geophysical engineer, your experience as an engineer, and then your roles as a teacher, writer, and artist.
George Saunders
Yeah, I went to the School of Mines in Colorado, and that was a very technical, non-theoretical approach to engineering. I was a geophysics major. So, the first thing is I was not very good at it and was always in over my head. So that was a pretty good education in just work because I couldn’—t –I had like a 2.6 or something grade point and I was studying all the time. I was a fanatic. I didn’t want to flunk out. So that was really good training for later.
In engineering, there was an ethos that you could get to the last step of a proof, and if you blew it, you got zero points. You know, that idea of no partial credit. And that really helps me in writing because a work of art isn’t like, oh, you spent two months on this, therefore I’ll be good. It doesn’t respond that way. So that was really good to learn about rigor and kind of respecting the problem in front of you and it being your responsibility to fix it. And then I think also that training really helped me think, analytically. If you were, again, doing a proof or something, you could tell exactly where you went wrong. And that was really helpful in writing to say “Of course, it’s a beautiful, mysterious, almost mystical undertaking, but it proceeds stepwise.”
When I get lost with a story or a book, I just think, well, you know, retrace the path and see where it went off. For me, it seems like kind of a combination of, very analytical step-wise rigor that then leads you into the mystery that you’re hoping to achieve. And then finally, in terms of the experience the degree got me, I’d never been out of the country before. This was during the early ’80s oil boom and even somebody with a 2.6 could go overseas, and I went to Indonesia and that just led to all kinds of political awakenings, just really a remaking of my whole shit, because I had never been out in the world. It was really the perfect choice. Except I suppose I always struggle with being a little under-read because I didn’t study literature in college, but I’m trying to make up for it.
Chris Warren
I’ve heard you talk about your craft as akin to designing roller coasters. Can you say more about that?
George Saunders
The temptation is to know too well what you’re doing, I think. And maybe even more so as you become more experienced. You’ve gotten praised for doing extra Y, so you think, “Okay, so I have to do extra Y.” Whereas that metaphor is helpful to me because the roller coaster designer kind of knows that the job is to produce thrills. And if you don’t, no one’s going to say, “Oh, it’s so symmetrical, you know, or the metal gleams so nicely in the sun.” The thing has a job, which is to kind of kick your ass and send you off it in a kind of dazed, happy state.
So for me, that’s a good way to think about writing because when I’m starting a story, I shouldn’t really know what it’s going to do, and I shouldn’t know in advance where it’s going to do it. I just have the intention that it should be breathtaking in some way. What that means is that if I get a little lost, I can kind of move away from all the conceptual ideas about it and just say, “Is this thing thrilling or not?” And if not, you know, why not?
What that does is – I hate this word – but whatever themes you might have thought the story was about, you have to discard those pretty quickly in deference to the thrill aspect. And then, if you’re seeking the thrill or the laugh or whatever it is, new themes will appear that you couldn’t possibly have conceptualized in advance. And for me, that’s the real thrill when – I’m just trying to be up a vaudevillian most of the time, trying to surprise you or make you laugh. And then in the process of trying to do that, sometimes you go, “Oh, this story is actually about something kind of deep.”
And the highest level of that is when you say, this is about something deep, and it’s not giving me an answer, but it’s, in my own mind, deepening a question. So that’s where the roller coaster is just – it’s a form of “Keep it simple, stupid.” You can have all the ideas and concepts about why your story is good, but if it’s not causing something in the reader, according to my view, then all that stuff is just window dressing.
Chris Warren
Why do you hate the word “theme?”
George Saunders
Well, it’s a good after-party word. I mean, once you’ve written a story, you can certainly drop in and talk about that, but I suffer from thinking about it too early. And I think a lot of writers do. They’re kind of having a good time typing away, but they’re desperately hoping that some theme with a capital T will reveal itself so they can feel valid. And, so then what happens is, I think writers start steering toward a theme or if you’re old like me, you say, well, here are the themes that I’ve previously explored, so let’s do one of those. Whereas I think theme is just sort of like, you know, a byproduct of a well-told story that isn’t trivial.
I think in school, we’re often taught to talk as if we release the theme, we’ve totally done the story. And of course, that’s not true because the statement of a theme – you could state the theme of Gatsby, but you’re not exactly doing the book justice. I just feel like, for me as a younger working-class writer, that word was a real problem because I was deciding too early what my theme was and then forcing this story to do my bidding. It was just a drag for everybody.
Chris Warren
While reading Lincoln and the Bardo and Vigil back-to-back, I was struck, obviously, about this sort of middle place you’re exploring between death and life and wondering about the ways that Vigil does or doesn’t continue a project started in Lincoln in the Bardo.
George Saunders
Yeah, it continues it because one of the things I love about that ghost stuff is it gives you a temporal freedom. You know, you can go back in time, you can even theoretically go forward in time. It also gives you spatial freedom. You could have these ghosts, at least in the second book, the ghosts can go anywhere really quickly. That’s kind of a little bit of a thing from a Buddhist teaching where in that after-death state, the mind is super powerful, and if you think of New Jersey, you go there. So that was just –just in terms of the kind of craft part of it’s really fun to have that kind of freedom. I guess with Vigil, I was thinking, okay, let’s just change it slightly and say, what if the people know very well that they’re dead? Unlike in life.
Honestly, for me, I’m not a person who has a billion ideas for books. If there’s just a certain feeling I get when I think in advance of a book, and if it’s a little bit of a tingle, like a little bit of excitement, then I just go ahead. And so I had a lot of fun with Lincoln, and I felt like I hadn’t quite got to the end of that ghost motif, mostly just because of the freedom it gives you to move out of the quotidian frame into something that has a little more temporal and spatial room. That’s really a fancy way of saying that I just felt like it.
Chris Warren
But also something seemed unfinished, right?
George Saunders
Honestly, no, I don’t think so, but except yes, in the sense that I have an obsession with death. Because ever since I was a little kid, I felt like if you could have death in the front of your mind, you would live better. You know, you’d enjoy things more, you’d be a better person. And conversely, sometimes I’ll wake up and go, “Oh my god, I’m living my life as if I’m infinite,” or “I’m living my life as if accomplishment is going to somehow spare me from death.” I mean, I suppose philosophically, it’s really a lively point for me. This idea of: 100% for sure you and I are both going to be dead. And even though I don’t really believe it. I believe you might, but not me so much.
But it’s the one thing we’re all sure of, and yet, the mind does this thing where every day you wake up feeling pretty – I feel pretty permanent, and I feel like the short term things I’m pursuing are very important and valid. And then every so often, someone you know passes away or gets sick or something – you get that kind of jolt. I think that especially with those two books I’m just trying to at 50, 60 years old – almost 70 now – just kind of find a ritual way to remind myself of that. Putting the books in that zone gives you two or three hours a day where at least you’re nominally thinking about it.
Chris Warren
Writing astonishing stories and beautiful prose is obviously in some ways its own reward, but you’ve also made a conscious choice, I assume, to continue teaching and to make teaching a big part of your activities.
George Saunders
Yes.
Chris Warren
Can you talk a little bit about the role teaching plays and where you might find it in your fiction?
George Saunders
In a complicated way, it might be a way that I give myself permission to go wild in fiction. I feel like, as a Chicago Catholic kid, if you’re having fun, you also have to be punished at some point. Or in this case, teaching, if you’re having fun, you have to give back, you know, so there’s some kind of – I have my best writing when I’m teaching, spending two or three days a week dedicated to teaching. On the fourth day, I say to myself, “Okay, you did it. You did your part. Now you can go back to being a wild person.”
So, there’s some kind of selfish dynamic there, but then also, I just kind of noticed that if you really do the math, the books – as fun as they are to write, and hopefully people like them – the books do fade, and you don’t get to control that. Books that were wildly popular thirty years ago, nobody reads them anymore, and so on. But the one thing with teaching, you can be sure that if you positively influence this person here, then they’re going to go out in a better state, and they’re going to influence other people.
As I’m getting older, it feels like in some ways a surer bet if I invest positive energy in my students then that’s really tangible benefit that isn’t really based on ego as much. In other words, part of the teaching for me has been over the years trying to – you have to still your ego in order to see how to really be helpful, and that’s really good. I mean, I love both, of course, but if I think about not teaching, I get kind of depressed. I don’t think I would like that very much.
I just had my first, meeting with my new students yesterday, and I drove home from there just elated. You feel like, “I could do something to help these kids.” And also, truthfully, I’ve only realized this the last couple of years – my life was changed by these two teachers I had in high school, and I mean really changed. I was not going to go to college and I’d never really thought of myself as an intellectual person. These two people, who became a married couple, just sort of stood in my path and said, “You can – no, you absolutely have to –do better. And you can.” And in fact, the man called the School of Mines and talked them into accepting me. I know what it’s like to have your life changed by a teacher, and I think that’s something I should try to do if I can.
Chris Warren
You spoke about Catholic school, and it actually makes me, sort of…
George Saunders
Nervous?
Chris Warren
That’s funny, no it makes me wonder, I get a sort of like a Dante kind of vibe from some of your work, imagining bespoke punishments for the vices of one’s contemporaries. And I don’t know if you want to say anything about that, but I’m sort of fascinated by the connection between your Catholic upbringing and your interest in Buddhism. When did you start to become interested in Buddhism and how do you bring those traditions together?
George Saunders
Yeah, well, I got interested in it because my wife, Paula, did, back, gosh, 25 years ago or so. She’d been doing some meditation. I could just see that it was changing her in certain tangible ways. And so, I started just doing some kind of freelance sitting. And I could feel the change. Paula and I both were kind of religious kids though in different flavors. We shared that. I think that for me now it’s not quite separate from Catholicism. Certain parts of Catholicism still really speak to me, and I can map them very naturally onto Buddhism.
Some of the nuns and priests were indirectly talking about similar things – prayer and visualizing what reality is and how that could actually alter your way of being in the world. And so that kind of just mapped really naturally onto Buddhism and into writing, actually. They’re all kind of, in the same burden. At the core of that is the idea that your experience is 100% mind. And mind isn’t 100% fixed – it’s mutable, and you can change it. For me, they’re not really in too much opposition at this point. Except that I’m just finding I’m a little lazy, so I tend to go, “Well, yeah, I’ll just write and that’ll take care of it.” And that’s not quite true, but that’s kind of my actual practice is to go out and write all day.
Chris Warren
Tell me about Jill “Doll” Blaine, the “spirit protagonist” in Vigil, and this idea of idiot compassion.
George Saunders
She has a view of the world that I sometimes have had, and actually this is something I went back to. When I was a little kid and I would get praised at school for being a good reader, there was a friend of mine who was a terrible reader, just neurologically, and he would get really beat up on. I thought, simultaneously, “wow, I love being praised. I really am good. I’m a good reader. I’m virtuous.” And then at the same time, a little voice is saying, “Yeah, but he didn’t – you guys are both six years old. He didn’t choose to be in the womb to be a bad reader. He just came out, and that’s his lot.” So kind of that thing of the very natural human desire to equate accomplishment with virtue in oneself. And then to just look at somebody who isn’t as lucky as you and think, “Ah, poor bastard, he should have done better.”
My understanding of that character is that at the moment of her death, which was so traumatic and unimaginable to her that she kind of bolted out of the moment and shot off in the direction of the person who had killed her, and then inadvertently goes through him, so that for a split second she is him. And that changes her whole view of self. Suddenly if her self could vanish and be replaced by his self, she understands that self is just an odor or something – something very temporary. But underlying that, she just doesn’t want to be dead. So, she uses the energy of that, as I imagine it, to kind of keep coming back again and again and again, under the auspices of offering that wisdom to the people who she takes charge of.
Part of the tension of the book for me is that I sometimes agree with her, but you can’t live that way. And yet ultimately, she’s right. You can’t live that way. I think that the tension in the book was that I actually agree with her. I think she’s ultimately right in an absolute sense, but in the relative sense, I agree with, for example, the [opposing character of the] Frenchman. And I agree with the reader who–I think the design is that the reader would get increasingly irritated with her in the face of this monstrous guy, K.J. Boone, and her kind of, idiot compassion towards him. So anyway, these are things that I think about all the time in real life too. And yeah, I love her and I think she’s, I think she’s going to have another couple 100 years of fucking up before she comes to a realization about all of this. At least I hope so.
Chris Warren
And it seems to me that something of the obverse happens with [the central character] Boone, where we think we know if we’re progressive, climate alert, etc. that he’s to be scorned in some sense. And then over the course of a novel, you give us a peek into his childhood, a little bit about his backstory. If we kind of come to complicate our view of Jill “Doll” Blaine, the same is true of K.J. Boone.
George Saunders
Yeah, I think that’s a great reading and I would add maybe one more note to it. I like to imagine the reader going through just what you described and then adding like, “Yeah, but…” and then being able to list the terrible things that he did within the book. I always associate with Chekhov that feeling where you’re having three or four overlaying swings of the pendulum. So yes, I think we come to some understanding about why he is who he is. And then, but still, he left this incredible wreckage behind him. But then what do we do with that?
It was a complicated book because I realized pretty early that I wasn’t just going to send them to hell because that’s what everyone’s rooting for. Instead I sent him to hell in a different way – racing around the world barefoot for all that eternity knowing that he’s wasted his life. But I think that’s right. And I, you know, I studied some of these oil guys. There’s tapes of them on Charlie Rose and so on. And they just are not – they’re kind of somewhat likable, I found them. When I was in the oil business, I met some people (though not at the same level as Boone), and for me the Cruella Deville model of good and evil doesn’t quite ring true anymore. You know, people who do these horrible things – they’re often outwardly likable and they can certainly make a case for themselves and you could make a case for them, you could certainly explain in a, causality-based way about why they ended up how they did. Good and evil are a little intermingled and complex.
Chris Warren
I know, Kurt Vonnegut has been a big influence on you. Did you know he spent time in the 40s at Carnegie Tech?
George Saunders
I did. Yeah. He was, I mean, also I know he worked for GE, I think, up in Schenectady, and I always had him in my mind when I was biking to work at the engineering company.
Chris Warren
Apparently he knew the Carnegie Tech fight song or alma mater by heart.
George Saunders
As he should, as one should. I’m trying to think if I can do that with a School of Mines song. I think I can come pretty close, at least one verse of it anyway.
Chris Warren
What else do you wish folks knew about, Vigil?
George Saunders
It was a real labor of love. I had a great time doing it. And I think, you know, something that I found out about it after I wrote it is it causes a lot of complicated feelings in people. Some people really hated it. Some people really love it. Some people are confused by it. And I kind of feel like that’s a step in the right direction for me because after so many years of writing and so many years of hearing what you did correctly, what people expect from you, you start to see that some of that stuff becomes a bit second nature, and you don’t want to be in a position as an older writer where you’re just kind of phoning in the old familiar effects.
I think this was the first book of mine, maybe not the first story, but the first book, where somebody gets to the end of it and looks at me like, “What did you mean by this?” You know, a lot of times, I think again, the Lincoln, people can feel what I think. You can feel the authorial vision, presenting pretty crisply, unambiguously. But this one, I struggle with it all the way through. And in the last few passes, there was a lot of agonized micro-adjusting of little beats to make sure that it landed in the way that was the most interesting to me. So I kind of felt happy that I’m kind of stumbling out into a new area where, me and my narrator might not be in perfect agreement.
I was kind of excited by that part of it that – it went out in the world and got different reactions than I might have anticipated both more positive and more negative and more confused. So, also happy about that. But also, I’m just really excited to come back to Pittsburgh because I remember doing events there and just making a mental note like “This is one of the best audiences you’ll ever have. So, if you ever come back here, bring it, you know?” And so I’m going try to do that.
Chris Warren
Well, we’ve got, we’ve got a lot to live up to.
George Saunders
Yeah. It’s all on you.
