Pushkin. This is talk easy. I'm Sam by writer George Saunders. He's the author of some of my favorite books including

A Swim in the Pawn in the Rain, Lincoln in the Bardo, and 10th of December, which was a finalist for the National Book Award back in 2013.

He's also contributed to the New Yorker since 1992 and has been called The Best Short Story

Writer in English by Time magazine.

Last month he published Liberation Day, his first short story collection in nine years.

In true Saunders fashion, each piece contains a mix of humor, joy, and despair, as he grapples with

these big timely ideas around oppression and revolution, free speech and civil liberties.

But beyond reflecting the politics of the moment, the book captures, as publisher Andy Ward

writes, the way we lose sight of our humanity through little failures

and compassion.

And as we head into what I assume will be a very fraught election week here in America, it seemed like as good a time as any to examine

those little failures and compassion as Saunders has done for the last 30 years

on the page. Now some of you may remember my first talk with George back in

2021. That episode focused a whole lot on his personal history from his

upbringing in Oak Forest, Illinois to his years at the Syracuse

writing program where he met his mentor to buy his wolf and future wife, Paul Reddick.

But this time around, I thought we do something a little bit different, something akin

to auditing one of Saunders' creative writing classes at Syracuse, where he's taught since

1997. And so with all that in mind we discuss the

intricacies of his writing process, how he goes about perfecting and ending, and

ultimately the nature of being an artist in these precarious political

times.

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