From the seed of historical truth that is the death of President Lincoln's beloved eleven-year-old son Willie, George Saunders spins a "story of familial love and loss that breaks free of its realistic, historical framework into a supernatural realm ... Willie Lincoln finds himself in a strange purgatory where ghosts mingle, gripe, commiserate, quarrel, and enact bizarre acts of penance. Within this transitional state--called, in the Tibetan tradition,...