Cleveland Review of Books Does George Saunders

 The Cleveland Review of Books published Kazuo Robinson's Going the Distance: On George Saunders’ “Liberation Day”. Being wholly overwhelmed by Saunders' Lincoln in the Bardo, and his New Yorker stories. I suppose some of those might be in this collection.

The review I thought was well-written, thoughtful; it should give its readers a reason to buy, to read, this collection of short stories:

“You are trapped in you,” a voice says in “The Mom of Bold Action,” the second of nine stories in George Saunders’ fifth collection, Liberation Day. It’s spoken by said unnamed mom, but she’s doing a bit of ventriloquism here, giving another character his line within an imaginary conversation, which exemplifies the trap rather well. Saunders’ stories are concerned with how people can escape themselves, and how capable they are of understanding each other. He constructs various scenarios in which his characters might envisage someone else’s inner life. In his 2016 Booker Prize-winning Lincoln in the Bardo, he worked with a supernatural conceit whereby souls moved in and out of bodies, which allowed Lincoln’s son to share in his father’s mourning for him, and for a deceased slave, Thomas Havens, to experience being the bereaved statesman. People are not usually so permeable. In Liberation Day, it’s more difficult for them to take such empathetic leaps. Sometimes they don’t even try.

sch 5/15