George Saunders
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Newsletter of the Year: Why Screenwriters Should Read George Saunders’s A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading and Life
Each Friday I write an original Filmmaker newsletter, which is free to all. Always original and not archived on the site, they consist of various musings, thoughts, link recommendations and sometimes even early versions of pieces that appear later here. And while yesterday’s “Top Ten New Posts of 2021” was determined using Google Analytics, I’ve chosen today’s “Top Newsletter of 2021” purely empirically. Forget Mailchimp open rates, this newsletter about George Saunders’s book on writing and Russian literature, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading and Life, is […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 30, 2021 -
“What I Regret Most in My Life Are Failures of Kindness”: George Saunders, Animated
Author George Saunders’ 2013 Syracuse University commencement address dealt with the subject of kindness. Much in the same way that David Foster Wallace’s This is Water was turned into both an animated short as well as a tasteful stocking stuffer, so too Saunders’ rueful musings. Congratulations, by the Way: Some Thoughts on Kindness is the name of the 64-page book, and an excerpt has been nicely animated by the folks at Serious Lunch.
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 24, 2014 -
OTHER PEOPLE TURNS 100
Congratulations to Brad Listi’s Other People podcast, which reached a centenary today with a big get: author George Saunders. If you read the print edition of Filmmaker, you will have heard about the podcast as I featured it in our Super 8 a while back. (My blurb is embedded here — Brad, thanks for the scan!) Other People is a twice-a-week podcast in which Listi interviews authors about… well, just about anything. Their books are discussed, of course, but also their biographies, their writing processes, their child-raising habits, their obsessions, their quirks… It’s always a deeply human conversation, and the […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 29, 2012 -
The Future Director Miranda July
Known as a West coast performance and video artist in the decade before her 2005 award-winning debut feature, Me and You and Everyone We Know, Miranda July seems to jump effortlessly from one medium to another. Her collection of short stories — No One Belongs Here More Than You — won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award in 2007, and more recently she designed an interactive sculpture garden that was on view in the 2009 Venice Biennale before moving to Union Square this past summer. At this point, there are very few career moves for Miranda July that would […]
by James Ponsoldt on Jan 22, 2011
