George Saunders is an eminent exception to contemporary literature’s broader retreat from wisdom-seeking. The Booker-winning and best-selling author has not embedded direct, Eliot-style philosophizing within his fiction, but he is distinctive for thoroughly embracing the role of moral guide—and for seeing his preacher-writer role resonate with an unusually large audience. His fiction has always had an ethical thrust, at its strongest in inventive and often brilliant short stories that channel the economically weak and exploited. And Saunders’s enterprising publisher has lately offered his wise, witty, and tender sayings in stand-alone works: Congratulations, by the Way was adapted from a graduation speech enjoining kindness; A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is a version of his Syracuse University course about Russian writers who, he explains, “regard fiction not as something decorative but as a vital moral-ethical tool.” In A Swim, Saunders has given grateful critics a tidy summary of his message: “that every human being is worthy of attention and that the origins of every good and evil capability of the universe may be found by observing a single, even very humble, person and the turnings of his or her mind.”