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.
