When you win one of the world's most prestigious literary prizes a few things happen: hundreds of emails from old friends, teachers and students flood your inbox, you embark on a circuit of interviews and there is very little time for sleep.
Not that this year's Man Booker Prize winner, George Saunders, is complaining.
"It's been so much fun. I think I'm going to have trouble going home and taking out the garbage," Saunders says on the phone from London, where last week he became the second American author to win the prize, with his debut novel Lincoln in the Bardo.
"When you're young nobody asks you to do anything. So someone says, 'Hey could you come to the grocery store and read your work and then mop the floor?' and you're like 'Oh yes, of course I'd be happy to do that'."
Saunders, 58, is well known as a master of the short story, so much so that "Saundersian" has become recognisable as a distinct literary style (he was on Time magazine's 2013 list of the 100 most influential people in the world). His stories have often been formally experimental, satirical and set in futuristic dystopias.
He has penned nine books, including the award-winning Tenth of December published in 2013, but the innovative Lincoln in the Bardo was his long-awaited first novel.
It tells the story of the death of President Abraham Lincoln's 11-year-old son Willie from typhoid in the midst of the American Civil War. Under the cloak of darkness, a heartbroken Lincoln returns to the crypt in Georgetown's Oak Hill Cemetery where his son is interred to hold his body.
It was an idea that took root in Saunders' mind more than two decades ago when he visited Washington DC and his wife's cousin pointed out the crypt and told him of reports from the time that Lincoln had gone there to be with his son.
Taking one of the revered giants of American history as his subject seemed too daunting for years. But Lincoln in the Bardo was Saunders' bid to avoid having "Afraid to Embark on Scary Artistic Project He Desperately Longed to Attempt" written on his gravestone.
The novel moves away from typical historical fiction territory with a giant cast of characters who haunt the cemetery that Lincoln visits. Among them are Hans Vollman, who was hit by a falling beam on the cusp of consumating his marriage with his young wife; Roger Bevins III who committed suicide after his love for another man turned unrequited; and Reverend Everly Thomas who is consumed by fear of his judgment day.
The chorus of ghosts exist in the bardo???, which in Tibetan Buddhist belief is the liminal state between death and rebirth. Fragments from real and fabricated historical accounts, dialogue between the chorus of ghostly characters and streams of consciousness form the narrative. The audio book version has 166 narrators including Julianne Moore, David Sedaris, Jeffrey Tambor, Susan Sarandon and Saunder's mother and two daughters.
When I speak to Saunders he is preparing to leave London to return to the US. He and his wife Paula live between Monterey, California, and New York, where he teaches creative writing at Syracuse University.
Saunders has been on leave this semester but looks forward to returning. He studied at Syracuse when he was younger and believes that teaching improves his own writing. What does he wish he could have told himself as a student?
"When you said that, I just had an image of myself walking by myself and just shaking my head like 'Oh what a dumb ass'. But yeah, I have nothing to say to you but 'Just carry on'."
Saunders says he was an earnest student, who thought writers should be loners and writing was meant to be difficult. It was "artsy" not to care about the reader and impenetrability was a good thing. But increasingly he found his own voice and discovered that writing could be entertaining for both writer and reader.
"I might have tried to find a way to tell that person to lighten up a little bit and do on the page the same thing that he was doing in life, which was trying to be liked, trying to be truthful and to give some enjoyment to the people around you."
Lincoln in the Bardo fuses the comic and the emotional, while raising the philosophical questions readers have come to expect of Saunders. It probes our fear and denial of death and asks whether there is a way to move beyond this.
Saunders had his own near-death experience when he experienced a mid-air emergency on an United Airlines plane which flew into a flock of geese. Smoke filled the cabin; the lights flickered. In that moment Saunders, who is a Buddhist, realised how far he was from a calm acceptance of death.
"I was terrified and I always saw myself as a person who would be calm, and all 'Hey everybody let's remember we've had a good life' and sing a hymn or something like that, but that was not me."
Hopefully, he says, he will spend his plane trip back to the US catching up on sleep. As well as needing to reply to all the emails he has received, Saunders has a "neurotic worry" about the blank page waiting for him at home.
"This is the first time in my life that I haven't had something at home mid-process when I went on the road. So it's a little worrisome for me, because I don't have something back there waiting for me," he says. "But I also have this theory that I've been doing this awhile and there are certain habits that kick in just from sitting down in front of a computer."
Saunders published his first book CivilWarLand in Bad Decline in 1996. He wrote the stories while working as a technical writer for a pharmaceutical and engineering company. It was a day job that had echoes of his life before he attended writing school, when he worked in the field in Sumatra after getting a degree in geophysics from the Colorado School of Mines.
He came to the decision that no matter what the response to his first book - be it good or bad - he would channel the energy into his next book. That is what he plans to do now: plough all the momentum that comes with winning the Man Booker Prize into his writing.
"This book was kind of a risky one. So now I can say OK that was good, people connected with that book. My sense of my reader isn't that far off from who they actually are. Now I can internalise that in the form of increased boldness for the next book. I want to try something even harder knowing that people will be with me."
Megan Mullally??? (who plays Karen on Will and Grace) and her husband Nick Offerman??? (who played Ron Swanson in the sitcom Parks and Recreation) have acquired film rights to Lincoln in the Bardo. Saunders is a co-producer and is due to write the screenplay. It is difficult to imagine the novel translating to a film, but Saunders says they want to "go big or go home".
"If we can't figure out how to do it to where it's really, really new and maybe as weird as the book in its own cinematic way, then I think we're not going to push it."
But pushing it - whether that be narrative form, language, or readers' minds - is something Saunders always manages to do.
