A Hard Rain Is Coming

In an interview with George Saunders, the interviewer asks if Saunders ever tried to write more conventionally:


 "I had about three or four years of this, where nothing was really working for me. This was my Hemingway-if-Hemingway-had-never-been-to-a-war-and-was-working-as-a-tech-writer-and-was-actually-sort-of-a-wimp phase. All these stories had titles like “In Parking Lot K,” “A Hard Rain Is Coming” or “In the Employee Cafeteria, Across from Employee Relations.” It was about the time our second daughter was born, and I was getting a little desperate for some power. In that desperate mode, all of my South Side of Chicago impulses came back, and I started simply trying to be funny."


As good as "In Parking Lot K" sounds, I'm glad he failed at writing conventionally.