Story Club with George Saunders

So, today we have the privilege of beginning work on a new story (“Feelings”) by the wonderful Ruth Ozeki. Ruth is a Booker Prize Finalist, who Dave Eggers has called, “One of our era’s most compassionate and original minds.” A novelist, filmmaker, and Zen Buddhist priest, Ruth is also a distinctive and soulful short story writer, as evidenced in her new (and first) collection, The Typing Lady and Other Fictions, just published earlier this week by Viking in June 2026.

Hello, beloved Story Club, I had an interesting experience this week. I’d requested, from Substack, a way of putting all of my posts here, going back to the very first one (on my birthday, Dec 2, back in 2021 (!)), into a single word processing file. They kindly sent me a link and I spent a good solid day doing the conversion, which resulted in a single (mammoth) Word file of some 1288 single-spaced pages, containing every post I’ve ever made here.

This site requires JavaScript to run correctly. Please turn on JavaScript or unblock scripts

Today we wrap up “Indian Camp” - apologies for the long post. Lots to say about this one… So, congratulations and thanks to all of you for making this journey through “Indian Camp” so epic and insightful. Today, I’d like to share a few of my thoughts on this last section and the ending.

Reminder: We’re discussing “Indian Camp” by Ernest Hemingway, in four parts. Catch up with our discussion: Part 1 and Part 2. Today we’re discussing Part 3. Sunday, we’ll talk about Part 4. So, right: escalation galore in Part 3.

In case you missed it, we’re reading “Indian Camp” by Ernest Hemingway, in four parts. Today we start Part 2. If you haven’t read part 1 you can go back here for the discussion. It’s a good one. Next week we’ll read Parts 3 (starting today) and 4 (on Wednesday).

Over beyond the paywall, we’re in the middle of an epic discussion of Hemingway’s “Indian Camp.” Join us for some great talk about an escalatory masterpiece. Close-reading a story like this is a great way of calibrating one’s sense of pace and coming to a new understanding of what actually happens in a short story (how much, how quickly).

The story, “Indian Camp” by Ernest Hemingway, was written when Hemingway was in his early 20s, describing the time of his childhood – so, say, around 1910. His family had a summer camp in Michigan. During that time, the word “Indian” would not have been considered pejorative (at least by the white culture). I’m going to use it in what follows, just in keeping with its usage in the story.

So, I’d like to try an experiment here, a version of the “page at a time” exercise I offered in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. The story is “Indian Camp” by Ernest Hemingway, a story that was very important to me as a young writer, just in terms of the sheer escalation within it.

Thanks to TIME Magazine for including two of my books on their list of “25 Books That Capture This American Moment,” and especially for letting me praise Dispatches, by my friend and hero (may he rest in peace), the great Michael Herr. Special thanks to Amanda Gorman for selecting Lincoln in the Bardo and to R.J. Palacio for selecting Vigil. There’s a nice video here. Over beyond the (really quite low!) paywall, we’ve been discussing style.