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The New Yorker: Fiction · The New Yorker

David Sedaris Reads George Saunders

August 1, 2024·47 min·2 clips
What if the most dangerous moments in history don't look like what we expect from history books?
Deborah Treisman opens with the podcast's usual setup. A fiction editor asks a writer to pick a story from the magazine's archive, then the context steps aside for the reading. David Sedaris is back as the guest. After earlier readings of Miranda July and Wells Tower, he chooses George Saunders's "Love Letter." Treisman introduces the choice with care, noting its April 2020 publication. Before Sedaris begins, the episode pulls history close. The opening passage suggests that history, while people are living through it, may not feel as clear as it does in books. Sedaris's reading becomes the center of the episode. The story's final stretch is a letter, tender and worried, from someone trying to advise restraint without giving up moral feeling. The speaker circles silence, danger, loyalty, and the memory of Jay. Love makes every choice harder. The repeated insistence that the recipient should not hide from events starts to sound less like guidance and more like pressure. The ending does not settle. Money appears as a possible last resort, but the bigger worry is how a family protects its conscience and each other. Treisman returns after the story, names Sedaris and Saunders again, and places the story in the magazine and later collections. The close turns back to the archive, pointing listeners to Sedaris's earlier visits, more New Yorker Fiction episodes, and the Writer's Voice podcast.

As heard by us

Sedaris gives Saunders' uneasy political letter a quiet pressure that builds through restraint.

David Sedaris reads George Saunders' "Love Letter," a story framed as intimate counsel under political pressure. The voice of the letter keeps circling the same hard problem: how to tell someone you love what to do when action may be dangerous and silence may be its own kind of…

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