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George Saunders's Reading List

Booker Prize-winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo. Curates favorite books for One Grand Books with detailed personal commentary.

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George Saunders's Top Ten Favorite Books

Top ten curated for One Grand Books with personal notes from Saunders.

Source: onegrandbooks.com

Cover of Stamped From the Beginning
Stamped From the Beginning
Ibram X. Kendi · 2016 · Buy on Amazon
"Should be required reading for any white person in America who has felt that familiar combination of heart-sickness and passivity when thinking about race."
Cover of Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan And Tumblr To Trump And The Alt-Right
Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan And Tumblr To Trump And The Alt-Right
Angela Nagle · 2017 · Buy on Amazon
"This book shot a lightning-bolt of understanding into my mind regarding the role of social media in the terrible political division racking our country."
Cover of Silences
Silences
Tillie Olsen · 1978 · Buy on Amazon
"Language is power, and Olsen does a masterful and compassionate job here of showing who has been denied language in America."
Cover of The Distance Home
The Distance Home
Paula Saunders · 2018 · Buy on Amazon
"This story, and the author's heartful understanding of it, has been deeply informing my views on class and addiction in America."
Cover of The Essential Fictions
The Essential Fictions
Isaac Babel · 2017 · Buy on Amazon
"I turn to Babel for reassurance that literature is capable of showing the real and terrifying mayhem that results when national systems collapse."
Cover of The Bluest Eye
The Bluest Eye
Toni Morrison · 1970 · Buy on Amazon
"Morrison models that capability here in this great novel, and reminds us that the first move in any assessment should be sympathy."
Cover of Words Without Music
Words Without Music
Philip Glass · 2015 · Buy on Amazon
"Read this memoir for a glimpse of a vanished country... that valued [education and the arts]."
Cover of A Grace Paley Reader: Stories, Essays, and Poetry
A Grace Paley Reader: Stories, Essays, and Poetry
Grace Paley · 2017 · Buy on Amazon
"Her funny, fond, wild energy produced stunningly beautiful stories, poems, and essays."
Cover of Dispatches
Dispatches
Michael Herr · 1977 · Buy on Amazon
"Herr was one of the great prose stylists of the twentieth-century."
Cover of Hope Against Hope
Hope Against Hope
Nadezhda Mandelstam · 1970 · Buy on Amazon
"This book shows us a much-worse time and its tragic effects on a group of tender friends/lovers/artists."

Books from The Ezra Klein Show: The Darker Side of George Saunders (2026)

Extracted via LLM (gemini-2.5-flash) from auto-captions of The Ezra Klein Show (2026-02-13).

Source: www.youtube.com

Cover of The Death of Ivan Ilyich
The Death of Ivan Ilyich
Leo Tolstoy · Buy on Amazon
"One of the one of the books I had in mind while I was writing this was uh death of Ivan Illich by Toltoy."
I Will Bear Witness
Victor Klemperer · Buy on Amazon
"I will bear witness by Victor Clemper. It's an incredible"
Cover of Red Cavalry
Red Cavalry
Isaac Babel · Buy on Amazon
"the other one I I would recommend, I maybe have recommended it before because I love it so much, but it's Red Cavalry by Isaac Babble"
The Place of the Eider
James Rebanks · Buy on Amazon
"It's a beautiful book called The Place of Tides by uh James Reebanks"

By the Book: George Saunders (2017)

NYT By the Book column (2017-02-16).

Source: www.nytimes.com

Cover of Moonglow
Moonglow
Michael Chabon · Buy on Amazon
"I am finishing up Michael Chabon's miraculous "Moonglow""
Cover of House of Earth
House of Earth
Woody Guthrie · Buy on Amazon
"picking away at Woody Guthrie's strange "House of Earth," which contains one of the best, slowest, hottest, yet most quotidian sex-in-a-barn scenes ever."
Cover of Swing Time
Swing Time
Zadie Smith · Buy on Amazon
"I loved Zadie Smith's "Swing Time" for its scale and heart and moral ambition and the high-wire act she does (and yet so casually) with language."
Cover of The Argonauts
The Argonauts
Maggie Nelson · 2015 · Buy on Amazon
""The Argonauts," by Maggie Nelson: mind-blowingly heartful and had me weeping on a plane."
Cover of Between the World and Me
Between the World and Me
Ta-Nehisi Coates · 2015 · Buy on Amazon
""Between the World and Me," by Ta-Nehisi Coates: a beautiful proof that the truth told urgently always yields poetry."
Cover of Boss
Boss
Mike Royko · Buy on Amazon
"Mike Royko's classic "Boss": a sketch of Richard J. Daley and his Chicago that reads like a crazed postmodern novel and brought back all kinds of happy memories of my Chicago childhood."
Cover of Words Without Music
Words Without Music
Philip Glass · 2015 · Buy on Amazon
"Philip Glass's memoir, "Words Without Music," had a powerful effect on me — made me resolve to believe in the power of art more fully and be less hesitant to take chances."
Cover of Sula
Sula
Toni Morrison · Buy on Amazon
"I had somehow missed "Sula," by Toni Morrison, and what a delight that was: a page-by-page walk-through of the way a truly great human mind thinks and reasons and invents and celebrates and mourns."
Cover of We Have Always Lived in the Castle
We Have Always Lived in the Castle
Shirley Jackson · Buy on Amazon
"I was thrilled by the genuine but meaningful strangeness of Shirley Jackson's "We Have Always Lived in the Castle.""
Cover of Johnny Tremain
Johnny Tremain
Esther Forbes · Buy on Amazon
"That was the first time I'd ever noticed style as a thing in itself — the thing that made the fictive world seem more real."
Cover of The Underground Railroad
The Underground Railroad
Colson Whitehead · Buy on Amazon
"I've been saving "The Underground Railroad," by Colson Whitehead, in order to read it just before our event in New York City in February."

Favorite books (2021)

Favorite books recommended by George Saunders, as compiled by radicalreads.com. Source article: https://radicalreads.com/george-saunders-favorite-books/.

Source: radicalreads.com

In Our Time
Ernest Hemingway · Buy on Amazon
"Before Hemingway was a famously macho world icon, he was a magnificent 20-something prose prodigy. He does more poetic work with two- to three-sentence clusters than any writer I know. I teach Indian Camp as an example of constant, meaningful escalation."
Cover of Dispatches
Dispatches
Michael Herr · 1977 · Buy on Amazon
"I re-read Dispatches whenever I want to be reminded of how intelligent and communicative prose can be. This is the best writing about war anyone ever accomplished. Herr is a legendary stylist, a great reporter, and a profound human being, and this book feels newer and more essential every time I open it."
The Bluest Eye
Toni Morrison (also rec’d by Gabrielle Union ) · Buy on Amazon
"This book reawakened part of me that had been slumbering since my young Catholic days—the part that knows that the point of life on earth is to learn to be more sympathetic to others. This novel — which was Morrison’s first — is both a modeling and a thrilling enactment of that notion."
Visions of Gerard
Jack Kerouac · Buy on Amazon
"Kerouac’s heartfelt ode to his brother, who died young, and to his hometown of Lowell, Mass., always fires me up anew about the power of language, and reminds me that the highest aim of writing is to jolt us (albeit temporarily) into a more awake and uncertain state of mind."

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