That inclination has been evident since his earliest published collection of short stories, “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline” (1996). It’s a trademark of Saunders’, that harmonious marriage of dark humor and warm humanism as he explores themes of guilt, mortality and the sublime absurdity of human existence – like Kurt Vonnegut, but if he were a Buddhist with an M.A. A really sad person can fart in an elevator.” “Life is both of those things at once, often in the same instance.

“My tendency is to sometimes be very serious and morbid and earnest, and other times just to be a goofball,” said Saunders, 58, from Houston, a stop on his nationwide tour with the novel, his first after decades of short stories. The boy knows none of this only that he must wait for his father, who said he would come back for him. All await some cure or revelation that will free them from their “sick-boxes” and reunite them with the world they so dearly miss. They were hurt in some way, cut down at some critical juncture that manifests as loss and regret.

They form a veritable American chorus of pain in the Bardo, a Tibetan term for 'transitional state.' There are many spirits in Georgetown’s Oak Hill Cemetery: a portly man, recently married a heartbroken lover a reverend a mother of three a foul-mouthed pair of drunkards dozens more. So ominously intones one of the many ghosts who narrates George Saunders’ “Lincoln in the Bardo” upon observing the young new tenant in the graveyard. “These young ones are not meant to tarry.”

George saunders bardo