![]() ![]() Since there’s no explanatory voiceover, it takes a few pages to absorb the audacious premise: It’s set in a Civil War-era limbo/purgatory, a twilight world where dead souls linger and converse. The book reads like a play for voices, with no narrator or stage directions, mixing 19th-century dialogue with descriptive passages cribbed from Abraham Lincoln’s real-life biographers. The author may have set out to write his first novel, but the work he completed is a genre unto itself. It’s not like anything anyone has written before. Lincoln, regardless of its length, is not like anything Saunders has ever written before. ![]() Before I’d read the book, I planned to ask Saunders about the obvious thing: After years of writing only stories (and the occasional novella), why take on longform, and what was difficult about it? But then I started to read-and short versus long stopped seeming like the most meaningful distinction. This week marks the publication of Lincoln in the Bardo, the long-awaited first novel by the acclaimed short-story writer George Saunders. ![]()
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