The writer George Saunders is fascinated by death, not killing or violence or even grave illness,

so much as the experiences of souls inhabiting some cosmic space between life as a corporeal being and whatever

punishment or reward awaits them. There's a lot of creative potential there. From KERA in Dallas,

this is think. I'm Chris Boyd. Saunders 2017 novel Lincoln in the Bardo, which won that year's

Booker Prize, mined the liminal space between the living and the dead by imagining the title character ravaged by grief over the death of his 11-year-old son during Lincoln's presidency.

Sonders new book, Vigil, takes place within the mind of a climate change denying oil tycoon near death and seemingly unconscious.

Hay J. Boone is visited by two different ghosts. One, a young woman who seeks to comfort him because

he's a human made vulnerable by his own demise. The other, a French inventor desperate to force

Boone to acknowledge the environmental ravages enabled by his life's work.

The book is a wild and fascinating ride, and it raises questions for all of us about free will,

culpability, and who is worthy of redemption. I spoke with George Saunders about the new book

recently at a live event at the Dallas Museum of Art. Here is our conversation. Welcome.

Nice to be here, with you especially. It's nice to be here with you as well. This story takes

place at the deathbed of a very bad man. For purposes of this discussion, for people who haven't

read the book, what do we need to know about K.J. Boone? He's a big bad man. For purposes of this discussion, for people who haven't read the book,

what do we need to know about K.J. Boone? He's a big stinker. Yeah, yeah. He's a, he's a, guy, he's part of that generation of, of, now sort of, we can be nostalgic about these

stinkers from the 2000 because things have gotten worse. But he was kind of a Bush era denier.

That first generation of people that figured out the rhetoric of how to do it, which

turns out they actually borrowed it from tobacco. There was the same PR groups and same people.

So he's that kind of person, but I think outwardly, probably pretty high functioning. You know, he's got a family. So he's that kind of person, but I think outwardly, probably pretty high functioning.

You know, he's got a family.

So there was a great Ezra Klein piece with Masha Gesson, and they made the distinction that that generation of stinkers were still kind of cloaked in enlightenment values.

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