Celebrated short story writer George Saunders’s first full-length novel
Lincoln in the Bardo
is a poignant ghost story centered around the true story of President Lincoln losing his 11-year-old son.
Now the
New York Times
has adapted the book into a short virtual reality piece available on their
app. The novel, which takes place in a single setting over a single night, has theatrical elements to it, a fact that director Graham Sack found useful for his piece.
“What ended up making the most sense was to pull characters from a number of different places around the book, but base them in just a single, specific moment,” Sack tells
Entertainment Weekly
. “It ended up being focused, in a sense, around the inciting incident in the novel, which is this encounter between Lincoln and his son. It’s this very tender moment where, in his grief, Lincoln goes to the cemetery a few hours after his son has been buried, removes his son’s body from the crypt and cradles it.”
Read the full story
.
