This week’s question arose from an A.V. Club staff discussion:

Something about this year made reading books feel not just crucial, but a little bit transgressive. Maybe it’s the assault on education and freedom of the press, or maybe it’s just that between reading new reports of abusive men and Trump’s latest attempt to chokehold the nation, simply reading for pleasure feels…

In our monthly book club, we discuss whatever we happen to be reading and ask everyone in the comments to do the same. What Are You Reading This Month?

For a medium spanning centuries, books feel more urgent every year. Be it an escape from reality or a searing treatise of it, our favorite books so far this year range from George Saunders’ postmodern masterpiece of a novel to Catherine Lacey’s complex and haunting tale of modern love. Of all the books reviewed by The…

Acclaimed short-story author George Saunders recently ventured into novel writing with Lincoln In The Bardo, which was a smashing success. Now Saunders is heading to TV with an appropriately mind-bending premise. His inaugural project is a “zombie drama and family revenge comedy” called Sea Oak, which centers on Aunt…

It took George Saunders a while to publish his first novel: The supernatural/historical fiction mashup Lincoln In The Bardo, released earlier this month, follows 20 years of award-winning short fiction, essays, and journalism from the MacArthur Fellow. But it didn’t take long at all for someone to think Lincoln In The…

George Saunders’ new novel is an astonishing feat of prose—but the audiobook is even more dazzling for what it does for the format, casting 166 actors to narrate what sounds closer to a play reading than a book.

Literary superstar and all-around cool guy George Saunders stopped by The A.V. Club to talk about his new book and the value of literature in the current political climate. Saunders spoke of the need to both resist and practice empathy, the latter of which is a core component of literature.

“There’s a nefarious conspiracy here for audiences to unpack, and it’s all part of the way [Jordan] Peele uses a genre framework to explore how racism survives and mutates in an All Lives Matter culture, taking different insidious shapes. Early into the film’s terrific first hour, Chris and Rose run afoul a bullying…

George Saunders has a well-established knack for political commentary and he already examined the Donald Trump phenomenon back in July, but since the orange guy in the red hat clearly isn’t going away as soon as we’d like, Saunders has apparently decided that he’s going to keep writing stuff about him. Last night, the …

George Saunders sets a high bar: His short stories, assembled in such fever-dream collections as Tenth Of December and Pastoralia, are feats of astonishing storytelling as much as they are the best satire of modern America. Saunders breaks with tradition in his new Lincoln In The Bardo, his first novel and a decided…

The George W. Bush years were dark, no matter which side of the aisle you sat on. Less than a year into his first term came the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil, and everything thereafter was haunted by the specter of war—first in Afghanistan and then, erroneously, in Iraq. The U.S. government engaged in torture…

Judging from the three-minute clip, George Saunders’ upcoming Lincoln In The Bardo will be both a masterpiece of postmodern storytelling and an audiobook revelation. In the clip, several characters and a narrator cobble together a scene as seen through their differing perspectives and, possibly, agendas: A boy passes…

When the story of reality becomes too unbearable, escape to a different one. There’s never really a year that goes by without the release of good prose to lose yourself in, and 2017 promises dozens of titles to transport you to another world. From satire to memoirs to novels, we’ve selected 12 of the books we’re most…

Welcome back to AVQ&A, where we throw out a question for discussion among the staff and readers. Consider this a prompt to compare notes on your interface with pop culture, to reveal your embarrassing tastes and experiences, and to ponder how our diverse lives all led us to convene here together. Got a question you’d…

In our monthly book club, we discuss whatever we happen to be reading and ask everyone in the comments to do the same. What Are You Reading This Month?

In the time between the releases of George Saunders’ 2013 short story collection, Tenth Of December, and the author’s debut novel, Lincoln In The Bardo (due in 2017), readers have had to look elsewhere to get their daily satirical doses of hope in the face of hopelessness, protagonists trapped by inescapable…

In his introduction to Invaders, a broad and thoughtful collection of science fiction stories, editor Jacob Weisman strikes an unnecessarily defensive tone. Because his assortment of writers are known more for traditional literary fare than genre labels like “sci-fi,” Weisman tries to anticipate and deflect criticism…

This week’s question is a yearly tradition:
What non-2015 pop culture did you just discover this year?

We’ve expanded the regular AVQ&A discussion prompts to ask several of our regular contributors (and you) a simple question: What are you currently reading? If you have suggestions for future AVQ&A questions, big or small, email them to us here.