He was born George Saunders and has kept the same name his entire life. Sometimes he moves through the streets beneath a great coat designed to keep himself from being killed. Otherwise he is fearless, naked in the evenings, a family man. There has been a moustache, a beard, a bald face. The area locale where he has chosen to live is brutal and cold and produces a large share of lonely people. He sleeps and eats and functions as any person might. But there the similarities end.

For part of each day, Saunders is a hero. He would never agree to this designation. But his modesty, his generosity, his expansive imagination, and his fully developed tenderness-generating technique are a large part of his heroism. His heroism is fitted with a blind spot that keeps Mr. Saunders from knowing about, or being able to acknowledge, the ways that he has beautifully scoured and remade—through artisan-quality writing—the people in many countries. His writing appears in books and magazines and quickly subsumes them, explaining the appearance of horizon fires in the far Northeast. The books of fiction are called CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, and Pastoralia. The Suits call his writing “stories,” but they are really soft bodies to wear for a larger experience of life, hollowcore person-shapes that one can slip on in order to attain amazement. Saunders writes bodies, and his readers wear them. Some of these readers are probably in your house. If they are glowing or trembling, now you know why.

The following conversation took place on an old Toshiba calculator.

—Ben Marcus

I. “PAY ATTENTION TO EVERYTHING AS IF THIS WAS YOUR LAST MOMENT ON EARTH.”

BEN MARCUS: When I visited your city of Syracuse, New York, I was kept awake all night by crows, who raised such a terrible noise in my motel room that I thought I might get killed. I later heard from other overnight visitors that this had happened to them also. Explain.

GEORGE SAUNDERS: It’s true, we have a lot of crows up here. It’s part of a Municipal Program to become the West Nile Virus Capital of the Northeast. We actually “recruit” crows from all over the United States—bring them here on special Crow Interview Trips, construct special “GlamorNests” for them all over town, screen weekend-long Heckle & Jeckle fests at our local moviehouses. And they are loud. We had one in particular around our house who used to sound exactly like he was calling my wife’s name (“PauLA! PauLA!”) until finally—in connection with the Crow Recruitment Program—we had a translator over, who informed us that what the crow was actually saying was,“I could sure use...