For the process of writing, Saunders reminds us, is as much a craft as it is a quality of openness and a willingness to see the world through new eyes.įunny, frank, and rigorous, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain ultimately shows how great fiction can change a person's life and become a benchmark of one's moral and ethical beliefs. Saunders approaches each of these 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 stories by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol, these essays 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, George Saunders guides the reader through seven classic Russian short stories he's been teaching for twenty years as a professor in the prestigious Syracuse University graduate MFA creative writing program. (Jan.From the New York Times bestselling, Booker Prize-winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo and Tenth of December, a literary masterclass on what makes great stories work, how to write them yourself, and what they can tell us about our world today. A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is published by Bloomsbury (RRP £16.99).

His closing note for writers is to “go forth and do what you please.” Saunders’s generous teachings-and the classics they’re based on-are sure to please. The writing advice, meanwhile, is expansive: revising, he writes, involves intuition, and he views a story as a conversation. That’s all a story is, really: a continual system of escalation.” Each story is presented in full, along with Saunders’s commentary: on Chekhov’s “In the Cart,” Saunders asks, “why we keep reading a story,” and on Tolstoy’s “Master and Man,” he writes that facts can “draw us in” when the “language isn’t particularly elevated or poetic.” Saunders’s teaching style, much like his fiction, is thoughtful with touches of whimsy, as when he breaks the action of Turgenev’s “The Singers” into a table and compares the short story writer to a roller-coaster designer. In surveying seven stories by Anton Chekhov, Ivan Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy, and Nikolai Gogol, Saunders concludes that the secret to crafting powerful fiction is, “Always be escalating. Saunders ( Lincoln in the Bardo) offers lessons from his graduate-level seminar on the Russian short story in this superb mix of instruction and literary criticism.

A swim in a pond in the rain paperback