Saunders: These days it seems to be the main mode of cultural discourse. What’s important is that you filter in enough intelligence to overcome that easy “us and them” mind-set. There are all kinds of shared ideas that people from two extremes of any issue would agree on. But when we start doing this mudslinging, and we start doing it in the stilted diction of most news TV, really all we’re doing is propagating the agitation. It’s just not funny to have real problems that cause suffering, that aren’t getting addressed, because a handful of people want to foster this kind of antagonistic spirit.

On each other…

Shepard: I love the way George uses freewheeling narrative to explore the lunatic—to get at stuff that’s, down deep, really important and sad.

Saunders: Jim’s one of these writers that just keep getting better. There is something unusual about someone who is successful, but still hungry to really go for the real shit. You get the sense that he’s guided by real moral urgency.

George Saunders

On being mean…

Shepard: One of the things I aspire to, and I admire in the writers that I admire, is that they treat characters with ethical rigor. I look for ways of putting the maximum pressure on situations where we’re supposed to be there for other people, but we’re not sure where our responsibility stops and starts.

Saunders: It may just be that I don’t have any balls, but I’m a lot more comfortable being harsh when I’m working in fiction. But when I’m writing about a real person, it’s harder for me to set the good parts aside and only go for the bad stuff. Still, if you take a good hard punch at someone who is 70 percent shitheel, that’s a good thing to do, even though that 30 percent is negotiable.

Shepard’s new book, Like You’d Understand Anyway, is out Sept 25. Saunders’s new book, The Braindead Megaphone: Essays, is out now. He reads Thu 6.