March 11, 2022, 1:09pm
George Saunders has been busy—teaching the craft of writing (rigorously, one might add) on Substack, as well as continuing to teach at Syracuse—but his personal writing hasn’t taken a backseat: on October 18, Random House will publish Liberation Day, his new short story collection. (!!!)
Liberation Day is Saunders’s first collection since 2014’s Tenth of December, and it will feature four stories that have never been published before. (So “The Mom of Bold Action” will probably be making an appearance.) In a statement, Random House described the collection as “a book that inhabits, and tries to reckon with, a world that seems to be losing its grip on its own humanity, with Saunders’ signature blend of darkness, hilarity, and hope.”
Sounds like the Saunders wheelhouse, but Liberation Day feels differently paced to Saunders himself: “I’ve found these last few years riveting and strangely clarifying,” Saunders said in a statement. “Everything that’s always been happening to people on earth now seems to be happening . . . faster. I tried to get some of that percussive energy into Liberation Day, as well as some of the joy of being alive in such a strange, transitional, dangerous moment.”
It’s a big year for Saunders short stories: the (strangely) Hemsworth-helmed Spiderhead (guys . . . couldn’t this one actually have been a Robert Pattinson role?), an action-film adaptation of “Escape from Spiderhead,” will be released on Netflix sometime in 2022. Never too much George Saunders!