BOOK CLUB: The power of connection
Concluding thoughts on "Vigil," goodbye to editor Ann Godoff, looking ahead to March reads, and fielding questions about Iran.
In our Ink Book Club conversation with George Saunders around Vigil this past Wednesday, we touched on some profound themes: death, the afterlife, capitalism, greed, sin, free will, and the value of kindness and comfort. That talk drew an audience of more than 2,000 on a weekday afternoon, which makes me think that more than anything else, what we crave most now — besides a sane and civil government — is community. We are so privileged to be able to come together around books.
Reading Vigil has prompted me to go back to Saunders’ past work, beginning with his debut, a collection of stories titled CivilWarLand in Bad Decline that was published in 1996. In the volume’s six stories and a novella, people struggle in a dystopian future, ”a degraded cosmos” where “Flawed” people stage historical reenactments for the wealthy. The politics of scarcity is the theme, with a Mad Max-ian twist.
We’d love to hear which of Saunders’ thirteen published works you’ve read, and if you now plan to dig into books you may have missed.
On another note, last week we lost the great book editor and publisher Ann Godoff, who died of complications from bone cancer at 76. Her legacy is enormous, as is her loss. Over the decades, here are some of the authors she edited and published: Ron Chernow; Zadie Smith; E.L.Doctorow; Michael Pollan; Thomas Pynchon; Ocean Vuong; Caleb Carr; John Berendt; and The Ink Book Club’s own Carol Leonnig and Aaron C. Davis. She came to book publishing in her early thirties after studying film at NYU under Martin Scorsese. She rose to become the head of Random House, and after being unceremoniously fired from that post, founded the Penguin Press.
In her New York Times obituary, one of her authors, Bill Shore, recounted his first meeting with her, during which she “described the book she’d like to see written, the book she said she’d want to read,” going on a “literary jazz riff.” She concluded by saying, “So, if that’s what you want to write, if you want to write a book about the cathedral within, then that’s a book I want to buy.” Shore then wrote The Cathedral Within: Transforming Your Life by Giving Something Back, which was published in 1999.
She was formidable, brilliant, private, and influenced countless editors who aspired to publishing careers as remarkable as hers. Her longtime Penguin Press colleague, Scott Moyers, characterized her influence on book culture as “incalculable.” He went on to say that “she made us all braver and better,” and that she lived by these words of poet Mary Oliver: “To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.”
We will forever miss Ann Godoff.
On Wednesday of this week, we will announce our March Ink Book Club pick, so stay tuned. And on Friday, March 6, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, we’ll host a live conversation with Emily Yellin, co-author of the late civil rights activist Reverend James Lawson Jr.’s Nonviolent: A Memoir of Resistance, Agitation, and Love, along with Lawson’s son, John Lawson. Please join us for an important and timely special edition of The Ink Book Club, and below you’ll find some questions to consider in advance of our conversation.
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