Dear Festival Friends,

George Saunders’s work is so weirdly inventive, it’s easy to think that it lives in the shadows, awaiting discovery. Of course, that’s wrong. Saunders is a New York Times bestselling author, a National Book Foundation lifetime achievement award winner, a Booker Prize winner, a National Book Award finalist, a Guggenheim fellow, a MacArthur “genius,” a member of Time’s 100 Most Influential People in the World club, and a darling of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. So, no—he’s not a cult hero, at least not anymore.

Still, there’s something about Saunders and his work that inspires a feeling of intimate kinship. Much of it is thanks to his flawed and endearingly relatable characters, once described by Mary Karr as people who are “wholly loseresque except for a sudden lunge at saving—often against unbearable physical or spiritual odds—some very broken human units.” There’s his humor, which manages to be biting but also good-natured. And there’s Saunders himself, widely considered a mensch of the highest order, a reputation he secured in 2013 when he delivered a convocation address at Syracuse about the value of kindness. The speech went viral and was made into a bestselling book, Congratulations, by the Way, which many of you have probably given as a graduation gift.

As devoted members of Team Saunders, we’re thrilled that his new book, Vigil, is now out in the world. Like his first novel, the Booker Prize–winning Lincoln in the Bardo, it’s something of a ghost story: A self-satisfied oil tycoon and climate change denier is visited on his deathbed by spirits who try to persuade the old sinner to reckon with his past actions. The book is by turns compassionate, dark, playful, morally complex, and narratively bonkers—the classic Saunders gumbo. It’s a sui generis brand of storytelling that Saunders has honed over the course of ten works of fiction—notably the short story collections CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Best First Novel; Tenth of December, a finalist for the National Book Award; Pastoralia, named one of The New York Times’ Best Books of the 21st Century; and Liberation Day, one of Barack Obama’s favorite books of 2022. Last fall, Saunders was awarded the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, in recognition of his “incisive, comedic, and urgent perspective on our world.” Truly, it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.

Earlier this week, we shared the news that some of our most highly anticipated author events for the 2026 Festival are currently at capacity, including Saunders’s. This is a first for us, and we’re carefully considering alternative ticketing options for next year. That said, there are still tickets available for several world-class authors, so we encourage you to check them out. Click here for tickets, the event schedule, and to join our waitlist.

Board of Directors
Edward Gale, Chair

Janet Bailey | Juliet Erickson

Andrea Fellows Fineberg | Jenny Kimball

James McGrath Morris | Carmella Padilla

Jenna Scanlan | Mary Sloane

Maria Gale, Ex Officio

Founders
Clare Hertel | Carmella Padilla | Mark Bryant