And since I was going into this endeavor feeling woefully deficient in my reading choices over the years, this seemed like a great opportunity to catch up. He also includes seven complete stories for us to judge for ourselves. Sanders doesn't only discuss these four writers and what made them great. Not only have I never read a single thing by the Russian greats spotlighted - Anton Chekhov, Leo Tolstoy, Ivan Turgenev, and Nikolai Gogol - I don't really gravitate toward craft books in general.īut this is not a normal craft book it's structured as a conversation.

I am also perhaps the most imperfect audience for this book. Not only am I a huge fan of Saunders’ fiction, but I’ve applied to - and been rejected multiple times from - the Syracuse University MFA program where he teaches in hopes of working with him. The process of writing, Saunders reminds us, is a technical craft, but also a way of training oneself to see the world with new openness and curiosity.Ī Swim in a Pond in the Rain is a deep exploration not just of how great writing works but of how the mind itself works while reading, and of how the reading and writing of stories make genuine connection possible.I am perhaps the perfect audience for George Saunders' new book, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life. In his introduction, Saunders writes, “We’re going to enter seven fastidiously constructed scale models of the world, made for a specific purpose that our time maybe doesn’t fully endorse but that these writers accepted implicitly as the aim of art-namely, to ask the big questions, questions like, How are we supposed to be living down here? What were we put here to accomplish? What should we value? What is truth, anyway, and how might we recognize it?” He approaches the stories technically yet accessibly, and through them explains how narrative functions why we stay immersed in a story and why we resist it and the bedrock virtues a writer must foster. Paired with iconic short stories by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol, the seven essays in this book are intended for anyone interested in how fiction works and why it’s more relevant than ever in these turbulent times. In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, he shares a version of that class with us, offering some of what he and his students have discovered together over the years. For the last twenty years, George Saunders has been teaching a class on the Russian short story to his MFA students at Syracuse University.

A swim in a pond in the rain book