Our Book of the Week this week is George Saunders' Lincoln in the Bardo. Is this The American Book of the Dead? Abraham Lincoln's 11-year-old son Willie died of typhoid in 1862. This inventive novel from the author of the Folio Prize-winning Tenth of December has a president, "freshly inclined toward sorrow," driven by grief into communion with the disembodied spirits of the dead in what becomes a meditation on the force of death in personal and collective histories, notably the American Civil War. 

>> Read Stella's review.

>> Read an extract!!

>> Read the review in The New York Times. 

>> And the review in The Guardian. 

>> Saunders inside Lincoln's head. 

>> The sadly shortened life of Willie Lincoln. 

>> George Sanders the novelist talks with Dana Spiotta the novelist

>> Saunders speaks.

>> c.f. Bardo Thodol, The Tibetan Book of the Dead.

>> Cheese.