I'm Gilbert Cruz editor of the New York Times Book Review and this is the Book Review

Podcast Special Edition.

This summer, in addition to our regular episodes, we'll have a series of interviews with authors

whose books made our list of the 100 best books of the 21st century so far.

Today I'm joined by George Saunders. George is the author of several fantastic short story

collections, two essay collections, and a novel. In the book reviews recent poll of

503 writers and other book lovers, three of those titles,

three were voted as some of the best books of this century.

Pastoralia, 10th of December, and Lincoln in the Bardo.

George, welcome to the Book Review Podcast.

Thank you for having me.

You have a great radio voice too, by the way.

Thank you. I'm glad I work in a newspaper. We do it all now, we do it all.

Yeah. We're gonna talk a bunch about Lincoln and the Bardo. I hope that listeners have had the

opportunity to experience that book which was one of the Times as notable books of 2017. It won the Booker Prize but

just in case should we tell them what it's about?

So basically about 400 years ago, my wife and I were up in D.C.

and her cousin pointed out up on the hill, a crypt, we could just barely see it.

And she said, did you know that when Lincoln was president, his son Willie died,

and supposedly the kind of gossip of the time was that Lincoln had gone into the crypt several times in this extreme

grief he was experiencing and in some way interacted with his son's body.

I said, no, I did not know that and it blew my mind and at that time I couldn't see any

...