Saunders Does It Again

George Saunders is one of the writers who can make me cry. He did it again with this new story, "Tenth of December"—in which, as he did in "Escape from Spiderhead," Saunders seems to be working through his feelings about the suicide of his friend and artistic compatriot David Foster Wallace.

A teacher of writing at Syracuse, Saunders is also a reliably perceptive commentator on his own work and on the craft of fiction. This Q&A with Deborah Treisman is no exception. Here's a nice bit:

I think fiction isn’t so good at being for or against things in general—the rhetorical argument a short story can make is only actualized by the accretion of particular details, and the specificity of these details renders whatever conclusions the story reaches invalid for wider application.