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.
“One
of the most accurate and beautiful depictions of what it is like to be
inside the mind of a writer that I’ve ever read.”—Parul Sehgal, The New York Times
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.
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