Ten Evenings: George Saunders

Not for the first time, Jill “Doll” Blaine finds herself hurtling toward earth, reconstituting as she falls, right down to her favorite black pumps. She plummets towards her newest charge, yet another soul she must usher into the afterlife, and lands headfirst in the circular drive of his ornate mansion.

She has performed this sacred duty 343 times since her own death. Her charges, as a rule, have been greatly comforted in their final moments. But this charge, she soon discovers, isn’t like the others. The powerful K. J. Boone will not be consoled, because he has nothing to regret. He lived a big, bold, epic life, and the world is better for it. Isn’t it?

Vigil transports us, careening, through the wild final evening of a complicated man. Visitors begin to arrive (worldly and otherworldly, alive and dead), clamoring for a reckoning. Birds swarm the dying man’s room; a black calf grazes on the love seat; a man from a distant, drought-ravaged village materializes; two oil-business cronies from decades past show up with chilling plans for Boone’s postdeath future.

With the wisdom, playfulness, and explosive imagination we’ve come to expect, George Saunders takes on the gravest issues of our time—the menace of corporate greed, the toll of capitalism, the environmental perils of progress—and, in the process, spins a tale that encompasses life and death, good and evil, and the thorny question of absolution.

The recipient of a 2006 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (“Genius” Award), George Saunders has authored two novels, four collections of short stories, a novella, a book of essays, and an award-winning children’s book. His most recent collection, Liberation Day, is a masterful work that explores ideas of power, ethics, and justice, and cuts to the very heart of what it means to live in community with our fellow humans. He is the author of two novels: his latest, Vigil, and the Man Booker Prize-winning Lincoln in the Bardo. Saunders’s collection Tenth of December, was the winner of the 2014 Story Prize and the 2014 Folio Prize. His work appears regularly in The New Yorker, GQ, and Harpers Magazine, and has appeared in the O’Henry, Best American Short Story, Best Non-Required Reading, and Best American Travel Writing anthologies. Saunders is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, was named one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World by TIME Magazine in 2013, and received the 2025 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters (DCAL) from the National Book Foundation. He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Syracuse University.