"A book can tell a kind of uber-story, in addition to the ones being told by the individual stories...."

“A book can tell a kind of uber-story, in addition to the ones being told by the individual stories. And my experience has been that once you figure out which stories are in the book, there is an optimal order—or at least a good order—that will serve to make that uber-story more clear, and to make the book more than the sum of its parts—in other words, the book can be saying and doing things you couldn’t have predicted or planned at the outset. And it can be saying and doing things that, even when the book is done, you can’t quite specify or enumerate. That would be the goal I think: an irreducible language object.”

- George Saunders (via mttbll)