NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - From the Booker Prize-winning author of
Lincoln in the Bardo and Tenth of December comes a literary master
class on what makes great stories work and what they can tell us about
ourselves--and our world today.
LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/DIAMONSTEIN-SPIELVOGEL AWARD - ONE OF THE BEST
BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, NPR, Time, San Francisco
Chronicle, Esquire, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Town & Country,
The Rumpus, Electric Lit, Thrillist, BookPage - "[A] worship song
to writers and readers."--Oprah Daily
For the last twenty years, George Saunders has been teaching a class on
the Russian short story to his MFA students at Syracuse University. 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. 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 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. 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.
A 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.
