A Dark Room on the Other Side of the World
They seemed to regard fiction not as something decorative but as a vital moral-ethical tool. They changed you when you read them, made the world seem to be telling a different, more interesting story, a story in which you might play a meaningful part, and in which you had responsibilities.
George Saunders • A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life
If American (and Americanized) writing has been predicated on "values," it's also been highly interested in the judgment of those values: in adjudicating what is "bad" and what is "good" in a legalistic sense. This sense of literature as a theater of judgment didn't originate with post-war writing- -see again the nineteenth-century French
... See moreLyta Gold • Dangerous Fictions
From George Saunders, on nuance and embracing complexity:
... See morethe writer doesn't have to have a fixed firm idea, but has to be able to take the reader on a journey to remind her that the world is complicated. From the very beginning, I understood writing to be about some kind of moral or ethical imperative. Absent that, I'm not that interested in it,