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Fiction

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

by •
March 2017, no. 389

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

Bloomsbury $29.99 pb, 368 pp, 9781408871751

Fiction

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

by •
March 2017, no. 389

From the outside, America seems defined by its brutal polarities – political, racial, moral, economic, geographic. The Disunited States of America. From the inside, the picture is more complex; American life is not lived at these extremes, but in the murky, transitional spaces between them. George Saunders’s much-anticipated novel Lincoln in the Bardo is set in another murky, transitional space – between life and death – a space that proves a powerful allegory for the desires and sorrows of a nation conceived in liberty, but forged in blood.

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Beejay Silcox

Beejay Silcox is an Australian writer and critic, the Artistic Director of Canberra Writers Festival, and chair of the 2024 Stella Prize. She was also the recipient of ABR’s Fortieth Birthday Fellowship. Her literary criticism and cultural commentary regularly appears in national arts publications, and is increasingly finding an international audience, including in the Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian and The New York Times. Her award-winning short stories have been published at home and abroad, and have been selected for a number of Australian anthologies.

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Comment (1)

  • I find Beejay Silcox’s writing refreshingly honest and very poignant, and look forward in anticipation to each of her articles and reviews. Her ‘Letter from America’ (ABR, September 2016) was outstanding and very prophetic. As with all literary critics getting the right flavour in a response to a writer’s efforts is not an easy task, but the ease with which she dissects a text and provides an analysis of its content and context is exemplary. Accordingly I look forward to more of her efforts.
    Posted by Dr. Neil MacNeil
    25 March 2017

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