Overjoyed to Let You Know That...

...my new novel is coming your way.

I’m very happy to announce that my new book, a novel, Vigil, will be coming out on January 27, 2026, published by my dear friends at Random House (in the U.S.) and Bloomsbury (in the U.K.).

You can pre-order the U.S. edition here…

…and the U.K. edition here.

Cover design by Rodrigo Corral. Thanks, Rodrigo!

The book came out of some thinking I was doing about certain politicians and business people who, back in the 1980s and 1990s, worked hard to debunk the science around climate change, and I found myself wondering what somebody like that might be feeling now, as the data piles up and the weather gets worse and the rest of the world comes to accept climate change as not only real but urgent. Are they sorry? Still in denial? What would repentance look like, for someone like that?

So, I set the book on the last night of the life of one such person, the fictional K.J. Boone, the head of a large oil company, and gave him a sort of guardian angel to help him along. The book tells the story of that final night and the various memories, hallucinations, and other-worldly visits experienced by Boone.

And this is the U.K. cover, designed by Greg Heinimann. Thanks, Greg!

I started the book in July of 2023 (on the Fourth of July, my notes tell me), up in Corralitos and worked really hard on it through some personal challenges, mostly to do with illnesses in my family. Through it all, I kept turning to the book, as we writers do, as a place of solace and control. It was a really good friend to me, and taught me a lot, especially in terms of taking on some new aesthetic challenges.

I think the trick, at this stage of things, is to find new ways of doing things – new ways of being funny, new approaches to pace, and detail, and all of that, a new relation to what style means – really, in sum, to find new ways of trying to move the reader, and broaden the palette of what I’m writing about – to make a world that’s more like ours, even if it’s strange. I feel like I accomplished these things in this new book or at least gave it my best shot.

In other words, writing it was a blast.

One of the things we’ve talked about here at Story Club is the way in which we have to try not to be too sure about what we’re doing; not resting on our laurels or knowing too well what our approach is, or what we’re “best” at; rather, we try to let the work tell us (teach us, even) what it wants us to do.

In the process, the work might show us some new things about ourselves and our talent; it can serve as a self-expansion device. The obstructions and challenges we run into as we’re writing (the doubts, the frustrations) are what it feels like to be stretched.

All of that happened while writing this book, and one of the things I’m looking forward to is being able to share some of that with you after the book comes out.

I have all the old drafts (and I mean all) and a very overstuffed notebook, and when the time comes, I’m happy to share all of that with you here.

I just (on Sunday) finished the first round of copy-edits and there’ll be a round of “first-pass pages” and then a few months of relative quiet…and then out it goes. I’ll keep you updated along the way on any and all developments.

Here’s the U.S. announcement that ran in New York magazine (thank you, Emma Alpern), and here’s the U.K. announcement, in The Bookseller (thank you Melina Spanoudi).

Just post-copyediting maelstrom.

There’ll be a tour in late January and February. I always enjoy that part, and I look forward to seeing some of you in-person along the way. We’re working on the schedule now and I’ll post it here as soon as we have it.

I feel so lucky to have been able to work on this book and I can’t wait to share it with all of you.

And now on to our question of the week.

Hello George Saunders,

I have been trying to write the beginning of a story for quite a few weeks now and I find myself deeply frustrated. I have been trying to write just a single story for about two years in which I have had to fail many times over. Now you may be thinking I would like to ask you how to fix my beginning. Au contraire! I would like to ask you, as my title suggests, about suffering.

Like all fellow spirits I harbor a secret desire for success in what I do, but I am continuously drenched in bad feelings of failure and thoughts about never (a dangerous word) accomplishing what I want to accomplish. Perhaps I am assuming a lot about your own biography, George, but please can I ask how you have dealt with this sort of thing? I am thinking specifically of before and after your successes as a short-story writer. For example, I am aware of the big book you spent many a year writing, showed to your beloved wife, whose head-in-hands reaction was probably quite devastating. Since then you dragged yourself back up to write many a great and wonderful thing. Do you still suffer when writing now? What do you do when you lose faith, as I assume you might from time to time, in the process? It's possible I already know the answer, which is printed on mugs everywhere in this country: Keep Calm and Carry On. But such a sentence may as well be written in a different language when you are living temporarily in the Land of Low Mood. Anyway, I wondered if you had any insight into the writing process and suffering and how one deals with this most human problem when things are not perfectly proceeding as they ought (said with irony).

Thank you and much love from the UK!

Q.

Thank you for this heartfelt question and sorry you find yourself in the Land of Low Mood.

I want to try to be totally frank and honest here, and cautious. Because yours is an important and complicated question and I can feel the genuine pain behind it.

First, I wonder if it’s useful to distinguish between suffering and sadness.

I think suffering is what happens when we find ourselves in an improper relation to sadness (or pain, or any other sort of difficulty).

If I’m climbing Mt. Everest, I am going to often be in pain but if I’ve done it before, and/or understand that the pain makes sense and is part of the eventual accomplishment, I’m not sure I’d say I was “suffering” in that moment.

In other words, sometimes I (yes, very much) find myself lost in my writing, and that makes me sad (agitated, self-doubtful, grouchy, feeling that I’ve lost whatever talent I once had, and so on). But because I’ve been in that place before and have found a way out of it (through process), I wouldn’t say I’m suffering, exactly. There’s part of me that goes, “Ah, this again. Well, this is part of it.”

Now (see “totally honest,” above), sometimes it doesn’t work that way. I am suffering, because I forget that the obstructions are part of it, and I get pissy and frustrated.

The one advantage of having done this work for so long is that, at such a time, there’s always a part of me looking down at the pissy part, going, “Be patient,” and “Stick with it” and “This will make a great anecdote someday” and, to some extent, I’m heeding that advice.

With Vigil, the new book mentioned above, there were many moments (weeks) when I was lost. I was having trouble finding the thread, and in a flavor that was new to me. So that was…interesting. (And I’ll talk more about this in more technical detail here at Story Club once the book has a chance to make its way out into the world.)

The lostness, several times, went on longer than I was used to. And then, yes, I was suffering. And what was needed was a kind of blind faith, like, “There’s only one way out of this, and that is: more work.”

And there was a second feeling, that I tried to encourage myself to have: “This must mean something new is happening in this book work and, therefore, if you persist, the book will be new.” I wasn’t always sure about that second feeling but it seemed like a good one to aspire to have, anyway.

So: pain and obstruction in our work can mean we’ve blundered into material that we don’t know how to handle; if we handle it, that feeling of struggle will inform the book and give it more life.

We hope.

I hope.

Last night, my wife, Paula, and I listened to a wonderful talk by a Buddhist teacher named Lama Tsering Everest, and she shared a story about her teacher, Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche, who once advised her that she needed to be more patient. She asked, “Rinpoche, what is patience?” and he said: “Patience is knowing that there will be problems.” (This is the announcement for the talk; I don’t think video is available yet, although some of Lama Tsering’s talks are on YouTube. Really worth tracking down.)

Doesn’t that advice make sense in a writing context? A problem arises (as they do, and had better, if a story is going to be interesting) and we can either say, “Oh, no, I’m doomed/I suck!” or, “Ah, interesting: now it’s a story, for sure. It’s pushing back, showing me its will. Now I need to really listen.”

And the way we do that “listening” is by paying attention to our visceral reaction to our own prose.

You say, “I have been trying to write the beginning of a story for quite a few weeks now and I find myself deeply frustrated.”

Those of you who’ve been here a while will likely know what I’m going to say next, which is: Is it possible you’re setting a too-high fence for yourself to jump over?

What if, instead of “trying to write the beginning of a story” you said, “I am aspiring to write some crap down, that I can revise later?”

That is a task no one can fail to achieve. (Ha, ha, but seriously.)

I can’t say it enough: writing really is rewriting.

At the moment when you, having written one such “unsatisfactory” beginning, delete it – is there another choice? Instead, might you look at it (tenderly, if possible) and say: “Why don’t I like you, dear little sentence-cluster? I’m genuinely curious. I’m not going to abandon you but I really want to understand what it is about you that is making me want to abandon you. Can you help me figure this out?”

And then the task is 1) listen to the answer, without any judgment, and 2) do whatever you can to make things better (that is, to make you dislike it less and maybe even like it).

With that…you’re writing.

Not failing, not, hopefully, suffering (since you’re writing).

A nice thought along these lines, from Malcolm Gladwell, that I found over on Medium, while I was searching for a David Foster Wallace quote about writer’s block:

“I deal with writer’s block by lowering my expectations. I think the trouble starts when you sit down to write and imagine that you will achieve something magical and magnificent — and when you don’t, panic sets in. The solution is never to sit down and imagine that you will achieve something magical and magnificent. I write a little bit, almost every day, and if it results in two or three or (on a good day) four good paragraphs, I consider myself a lucky man.”

Same site, a David Foster Wallace quote, although not the one I went looking for:

“You know, the whole thing (is) about perfectionism. (P)erfectionism is very dangerous. Because of course if your fidelity to perfectionism is too high, you never do anything. Because doing anything results in…it’s actually kind of tragic because you sacrifice how gorgeous and perfect it is in your head for what it really is. And there were a couple of years where I really struggled with that.”

So, Dear Questioner, I wish you the very best. And, if it helps – what you’re calling “suffering” really just means, at heart, that you care. Maybe, when you’re feeling that suffering, you might just say to yourself: “Good for you: you care deeply. Now find a way to put that care into action.”

Story Club, any thoughts for our questioner?