Author(s): George Saunders

Literature | Russia

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.

Review: A wonderful book ... This book is a delight ... I love the warmth with which he writes about this teaching, and agree wholeheartedly ... All this makes Saunders's book very different from just another "how to" creative writing manual, or just another critical essay ... One of the pleasures of this book is feeling his own thinking move backwards and forwards, between the writer dissecting practice and the reader entering in through the spell of the words, to dwell inside the story -- Tessa Hadley * Guardian *
Saunders is such a wise and amiable teacher ... A page-turner -- Robert Webb
Luminously perceptive * Guardian *
A masterclass in how to be human ... unfailingly, often thrillingly illuminating ... Published any time, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain would be a joyous reminder that fiction is "the most effective mode of mind-to-mind communication ever devised". Published now, it feels like vital and civilising corrective to the pretend certainties of public life - and, increasingly, of our personal lives too * Telegraph *

Author Biography: George Saunders is the author of twelve books. His debut novel Lincoln in the Bardo won the 2017 Man Booker Prize and the Premio Rezzori prize. His collection Tenth of December was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the inaugural Folio Prize. He has received MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships, the PEN/Malamud Prize for excellence in the short story, and the 2023 Library of Congress Prize. He has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2013, he was named one of the world's 100 most influential people by Time magazine. He teaches in the creative writing program at Syracuse University.