George Saunders Has a New Mantra

Anyone who loves George Saunders’s writing can tell you about his wicked imagination: luminous, dark, wholly original, and quite frequently supernatural. Saunders is, after all, the man who gave us Lincoln in the Bardo, about a grieving president and the chorus of ghosts he meets in the graveyard; “Escape From Spiderhead,” a Huxley-esque vision of criminal justice and personal responsibility; and “Fox 8,” about a fox who begins to understand human language by eavesdropping on people’s bedtime stories.