THE GHOSTS OF GEORGE SAUNDERS

GEORGE SAUNDERS USED to be a short-fiction guy. A creative-writing instructor at Syracuse University, he was a 2013 National Book Award finalist for Tenth of December, his fourth story collection. But seeds for a novel were planted years earlier during a visit to Washington, when a relative pointed out Willie Lincoln’s crypt. The third child of Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln died of typhoid in the winter of 1862, and the president was said to have sneaked out of the White House alone several times to visit his son’s corpse. “I imagined Lincoln with the body across his knees, like a mash-up of the Pietà and the Lincoln Memorial, and it just kind of stuck in my head,” Saunders says. Much of the dialogue in his haunting debut novel,