GEORGE SAUNDERS

The American writer tells us about his new collection of short stories

- Jonathan Wright

ALL WRITERS HAVE THEIR PROCESS. SOME are planners; some set off without necessarily knowing where they're going. George Saunders belongs in the latter category, but in a very particular way. He likens his approach to "procedural pointillism", after a postImpressionist painting technique in which images are made up from small dots of paint.

Saunders edits and re-edits his prose. "What I'll do is take a given story and then go crazy on one section of it, try to perfect it," he explains. "Then, if I do that, it'll start telling me what the next section needs to do, and so on." As to how this works in practice, the short stories in Saunders's new collection Liberation Day resonate with each other without being thematically linked in a conventional sense. This is slipstream fiction where past, present and future are in a dynamic relationship. The tone set by the title story, which retells the Battle of the Little Bighorn, reminds us of our current reality of societies with huge inequalities, and introduces a cast of actors in the future cut adrift from their own identities.

Rather than over-thinking themes or plotting, Saunders says, "I'm trying to make [the story] mean whatever it means more decisively." It's an approach in part rooted in a need to "assuage my own anxiety about writing".