The Diplomat
People, composure and the difficult conversation held well.
George Saunders earns The Diplomat by leading through moral imagination rather than institutional power. He reads political crisis through a narrative lens, treating fiction as a shortcut to truth that cuts beneath surface confusion, and locates democratic resilience in truth-recognition and community-scale empathy.
“You mentioned earlier how you start with the voice for your stories in your last book in a swimming upon the rain, you said that writing for years more of a feeling process than a thinking process or like that. I wanted to talk about the story.”
“She tells us through the end, and then she discards it. And that's familiar to me. You know, that feeling where you say, well, I'll write the story, but only if it'll be good. You know, well, so she's got a little bit of a completion problem because she completes the stories in her mind and then decides they're no good.”
“I would say sort of like a record of my best self, you know, I mean, if I look at my actual life during that period, it's kind of a, you know, mid-level, anxious, dope really. You know, nothing, always a little behind the news, you know, and a little insufficiently tender and all that.”
“It does. I was kind of writing these stories all through all of that, but to have them all in one place is really nice. The story form is something I've been doing since I was in my 20s, and it just feels like home.”
Ways to Change the World with Krishnan Guru-Murthy: “‘We are being beaten into submission with lies’ - writer George Saunders on Trump, truth and power”
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