{"description": "February 1862. The Civil War is less than one year old. The fighting has begun in earnest, and the nation has begun to realize it is in for a long, bloody struggle. Meanwhile, President Lincoln's beloved eleven-year-old son, Willie, lies upstairs in the White House, gravely ill. In a matter of days, despite predictions of a recovery, Willie dies and is laid to rest in a Georgetown cemetery. \"My poor boy, he was too good for this earth,\" the president says at the time. \"God has called him home.\" Newspapers report that a grief-stricken Lincoln returns, alone, to the crypt several times to hold his boy's body. From that seed of historical truth, George Saunders spins a story of familial love and loss that breaks free of its historical framework into a supernatural realm both hilarious and terrifying. Willie Lincoln finds himself in a strange purgatory where ghosts mingle, gripe, commiserate, quarrel, and enact bizarre acts of penance. Within this transitional state -- called, in the Tibetan tradition, the bardo -- a monumental struggle erupts over young Willie's soul.", "links": [{"title": "Book info (from the author's website)", "url": "http://www.georgesaundersbooks.com/lincoln-in-the-bardo/", "type": {"key": "/type/link"}}, {"title": "New York Times review", "url": "http://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/09/books/review/lincoln-in-the-bardo-george-saunders.html", "type": {"key": "/type/link"}}], "title": "Lincoln in the Bardo", "covers": [7909378, -1, 8582734, 8858208, 10360665, 8596050, 14071512, 8160268, 13561486, 13916810], "subject_places": ["United States", "Georgetown (Washington, D.C.)"], "subjects": ["FICTION / Ghost", "Presidents", "Biographical fiction", "Fiction", "Grief", "Historical fiction", "FICTION / Literary", "FICTION / Historical", "Fiction, biographical", "Fiction, historical", "Presidents, united states, fiction", "Purgatory", "Large type books", "LGBTQ historical fiction", "nyt:combined-print-and-e-book-fiction=2017-03-05", "New York Times bestseller", "New York Times reviewed", "Fiction, historical, general", "18.06 Anglo-American literature", "Lincoln, Abraham, 1809-1865 - Fiction", "Presidents - United States - Fiction", "Grief - Fiction", "Historical", "Ghost", "General", "Bereavement", "American Civil War", "Slavery"], "key": "/works/OL17635834W", "authors": [{"author": {"key": "/authors/OL537475A"}, "type": {"key": "/type/author_role"}}, {"type": {"key": "/type/author_role"}, "author": {"key": "/authors/OL4181476A"}}], "type": {"key": "/type/work"}, "genres": ["/tags/OL170T"], "latest_revision": 28, "revision": 28, "created": {"type": "/type/datetime", "value": "2017-04-02T14:04:54.562480"}, "last_modified": {"type": "/type/datetime", "value": "2026-09-01T14:25:55.861580"}}