George Saunders: Angels, Ghosts and the Moral Imagination

S1E4 - George Saunders: Angels, Ghosts and the Moral Imagination

Published: February 21, 2026

Duration: 44:35

What if dying is not an ending, but a moment of radical clarity? In his new novel "Vigil," George Saunders conjures a strange and often comic world of bickering angels visiting a dying, deeply flawed man—debating and waiting to see whether he can face the truth about himself before it’s too late.

In this conversation, Steve Paulson talks with Saunders about the evolution of his ideas about death and the possibility of an afterlife. Dying, he says, may be “the ultimate experience of wonder,” and he believes ghost stories can open powerful imaginative spaces for novelist...