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A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life
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About This Book
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.
Reviews
"He interrogates his own responses, asks you for yours, never quite settles for an all-encompassing interpretation ..."
"On the surface, this may seem a dry endeavor."
"His trick...is not to be so pedagogical about it."
"This isn't esoteric literary criticism or dry, mansplaining lectures."
"he...communicates in plain prose much of what his students have taught him, as well as his own personal musings on life, art and death."
"[a] thrilling literary lesson ..."
"None I know do both with Saunders's microscopic attention to the myriad impressions and calculations that occur within us when we compose or absorb even a single word on the page ..."
"This book is a delight, and it's about delight too."
"Saunders' commentary on the stories reads like the coffee-stained notes of a professor fond of the subject—and his students."
"A Swim in the Pond in the Rain is not a work of biography — or of scholarship."
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