George Saunders & Joshua Lutz: Orange Blossom Trail

A call-and-response between Lutz’s photography of labor conditions in America and Saunders’ writings

In Orange Blossom Trail, American writer George Saunders (born 1958) and American photographer Joshua Lutz (born 1975) offer an alternately poetic and searing evocation of the cruelty and tender beauty of contemporary American life. Lutz (whose photobooks, including Mind the Gap and Hesitating Beauty, have been named Best Art Books by Time and PhotoEye) and Saunders (Man Booker Prize–winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo and MacArthur Award recipient) first met on a magazine assignment, where they discovered a shared interest in both the psychological and material conditions of the laboring individual and the Buddhist teachings of attachment and the sacredness of existence. Through Lutz’s photos and three texts by Saunders, the book asks: When do we zoom in and when do we zoom out from the individual lives whose labor supports other lives? Orange Blossom Trail is a meditation, in two voices, on the alienation of the industrialized landscape and the brutality of American inequality. Replete with a cover printed in four-color silkscreen, white foil-stamped text and textured colored endpapers, the volume is treated with special touches while remaining affordable.