Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso This Is America with George Saunders
17 snips
Feb 8, 2026 
George Saunders, acclaimed novelist and Booker Prize winner known for compassionate, inventive fiction. He discusses his new novel Vigil, its afterlife setting and climate themes. Brief stories about near-death moments and a formative Singapore experience. Conversations about crafting difficult voices, moral stakes of writing about climate denial, and literature’s role in comfort and connection.
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Near-Death Plane Scare
- George Saunders described a terrifying in-flight emergency where the plane lurched and dropped, and passengers screamed.
- A calm moment with a 14-year-old passenger helped him regain composure before the pilot landed with one engine.
Tackling Hard Subjects Sparks Creativity
- Saunders chose to write about climate change because confronting difficult, earnest subjects forces new creative moves.
- He saw demonstrating climate impacts in news as a prompt to imagine someone who spent a life denying those harms.
Singapore Moment Changed His Politics
- Saunders told a pivotal story from Singapore where he watched women doing backbreaking night work moving rubble.
- That sight made him feel solidarity with laborers and shifted his political imagination away from Ayn Rand individualism.
