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
"Best Nonfiction Books of the Past Two Decades" 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.
