There's always method to Saunders' madness, and here it forces readers to realize, as if for the first time, the ultimate oddness of our own existence namely, that there's an end to it that we and everyone we love are going to die. This is Saunders, after all, whose imagination effortlessly mashes together the hell-fire visions of Hieronymus Bosch with crude Middle-School anatomical humor and the deadpan surrealism of Rod Serling. Lincoln in the Bardo is searing, inventive and bizarre. Though it's early to say, I feel pretty safe in predicting that this is going to be one of the year's most acclaimed novels. It's that image, of Lincoln cradling the corpse of his beloved son in a Pietà pose, that inspires George Saunders' first novel, called Lincoln in the Bardo. Newspapers reported that the president visited the crypt to open his son's coffin and hold his body. The Lincolns' third son was said to be their favorite, and after Willie was interred in a borrowed mausoleum in Oak Hill Cemetery in Georgetown, his father, Abraham Lincoln, returned to that cemetery several times. Willie Lincoln was only 11 when he died in February 1862 of typhoid fever. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Lincoln in the Bardo Author George Saunders
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