CCLaP: Let’s start with this, before anything else. I’ve been reading through all of your work over the last several weeks, and the first really big surprise to me was that, for lack of a better word, it’s very traditionally in the “bizarro” literature vein. Very odd, very weird stories. I read a lot of that kind of work, but most of the authors I know, they are struggling just to find little niche audiences. I wonder if you’ve ever given some thought as to why your work in particular has had such a huge, sort of general mainstream popularity to it. If you’ve ever given some thought to this subject before. George Saunders: I try not to. It’s terrifying. [Laughs] No, I really don’t know. I mean, my thought was always to try to write as truthfully as I could, try to get in as much of the real feeling of life as I could. And I got to a certain point where to do that honestly, it had to go a little weird. I think part of it was that I honestly wasn’t trying to make a gimmick or be weird; I was really just trying to steer towards what felt like urgent shit, you know. It wasn’t a point where I was like, “Can I be experimental?” It was, “Why is the stuff I’m writing right now not actually serving the truth? Why does it feel kind of false?” And the reason was, I was being kind of a knee-jerk realist. And a lot of the weird stuff – the class stuff, the money stuff, the really grab you by your balls stuff – to really get at it, it felt like you really had to go a little bit off the track. Now, why it caught on, I’m not sure. I’m guessing it’s the humor. Early on, a lot of what I heard was, “Oh, this is funny!” Not, “This is subversive,” but “this is funny.” It gets them looking left, and then you swerve right, and you can kind of get a two-for-one if you’re lucky. It can be funny and also be kind of a pill that explodes later. And in fact you come from this really interesting background, and this interesting way to come into a career of writing. We won’t go into too many details, but suffice to say, you originally came from a nonwriting background. Yeah, I grew up here on the southside. A lot of readers, a lot of smart people, a lot of politically engaged people, but I didn’t really know a lot of writers necessarily. And then I went into engineering and worked in Asian oil fields, and writing kind of came up from behind, from underneath. But meanwhile, there was a pretty good period of kind of intense living in the world, trying to make a living and so on. So in retrospect it was great. Do you follow along with any of the other writers who do the kind of work that you also do? Mark Leyner or Will Self or any of the more basement-press writers of that sort?
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Will Self I like. Mark Leyner was a huge influence. When [my first book] came out, I was reading a lot of him and being blown away. But for me, it’s almost a lineage that cuts across time, so you can go back to Gogol, the original crazy visionary. I’ve never been the guy who’s read everything, but what I’ll do is get on a certain vein, and kind of work it. One writer will lead me to another then another. But also I’m really