THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER PICKED BY THE SUNDAY TIMES GUARDIAN INDEPENDENT IRISH TIMES
SPECTATOR TLS NEW STATESMAN MAIL ON SUNDAY I PAPER PROSPECT REVEW31 AND EVENING STANDARD
AS A BOOK OF 2021 'A masterclass from a warm and engagingly enthusiastic companion' Guardian
Summer Reading Picks 2021 'This book is a delight and it's about delight too. How necessary
at our particular moment' Tessa Hadley ________________ From the New York Times-bestselling
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. 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.
