George Saunders presents Vigil

Booker Prize winner and National Book Award finalist George Saunders joins us at Congregation Beth Elohim to discuss his new novel, Vigil.

Tickets include a hardcover copy of Vigil, which will be available for pickup at the event. Books will be pre-signed and you will have the opportunity to have them personalized by George Saunders.

Doors open at 6:30 PM.

About Vigil:

A wise, playful, electric novel from the #1 New York Times bestselling, Booker Prize–winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo, taking place at the bedside of an oil company CEO in the twilight hours of his life as he is ferried from this world into the next.

Not for the first time, Jill “Doll” Blaine finds herself hurtling toward earth, reconstituting as she falls, right down to her favorite black pumps. She plummets towards her newest charge, yet another soul she must usher into the afterlife, and lands headfirst in the circular drive of his ornate mansion.

She has performed this sacred duty 343 times since her own death. Her charges, as a rule, have been greatly comforted in their final moments. But this charge, she soon discovers, isn’t like the others: the powerful K. J. Boone will not be consoled, because he has nothing to regret. He lived a big, bold life, and the world is better for it. Isn’t it?

Vigil transports us, careening, through the wild final evening of an epic, complicated life. Crowds of people and animals—worldly and otherworldly, alive and dead—arrive, clamoring for a reckoning. Birds swarm the dying man’s room, a black calf grazes on the love seat, a man from a distant, drought-ravaged village materializes, two oil-business cronies from decades past show up with chilling plans for Boone’s postdeath future.

With the acuity and explosive imagination we’ve come to expect, George Saunders takes on the gravest issues of our time—the menace of corporate greed, the toll of capitalism, the environmental perils of progress—and, in the process, spins a tale that encompasses life and death, good and evil, and the thorny question of absolution.

George Saunders is the author of thirteen books, including the novel Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the Booker Prize, and the story collections Pastoralia and Tenth of December, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. He has received fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and a PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, and was included in Time’s list of the one hundred most influential people in the world. He teaches in the creative writing program at Syracuse University.

George Saunders photo credit: Zach Krahmer

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