A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: From the Man Booker Prize-winning, New York Times-bestselling author of Lincoln in the Bardo

Product Information

The new book emerges from his longtime course on the 19th-century Russian short story — on Chekhov and Turgenev, Tolstoy and Gogol. He dedicates it to his students, “some of the best young writers in America,” he describes them. “They arrive already wonderful.”

Nevertheless, reading Chekhov again, after many years, in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain forced a realization: Those of us who complain about New Yorker stories are really just complaining about Chekhov. (His reputation as a literary giant makes him a far less inviting target for populist derision than a middlebrow literary magazine that has repeatedly rejected our own submissions.) Chekhov is the originator and the master of the quiet story in which not much changes in a character’s circumstances or outlook, except perhaps for the bolt of enlightenment, sometimes labeled an “epiphany,” that strikes the character (or perhaps only the reader) toward the end. Now, I’m as self-interested a champion of fiction as anyone, but such overstatement does the form no favors — at best it feels naïve, at worst, deeply solipsistic. Is the invasion of Iraq best understood as a “literary failure,” as Saunders has written? Can racism be described as an “antiliterary impulse”?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. Here’s where I must admit that I can find myself in an occasional bardo of sorts about Saunders, torn between admiration and wariness. The breadth of his belief in fiction is inspiring — and suspiciously flattering to the reader. “There’s a vast underground network for goodness at work in the world,” he writes. “A web of people who’ve put reading at the center of their lives because they know from experience that reading makes them more expansive, generous people.” If there are few more treacherous places to turn up than as a character in a George Saunders story — he might have you slapping yourself in the face with your own amputated hand, as he condemns one miserable case — there might be no cushier place than to be a student in his classroom. 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. Saunders discusses each story’s structure, energy flow, the questions it raises, and how “meaning is made,” embracing both technical finesse and the mysteries at creation’s core.... An invaluable and uniquely pleasurable master course and a generous celebration of reading, writing, and all the ways literature enriches our lives.” — Booklist (starred review)

Superb mix of instruction and literary criticism... Saunders’s generous teachings—and the classics they’re based on—are sure to please.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Success!

Saunders’s concentration is often on the forward dynamic of the stories, their “tight, escalatory pattern”. In “a highly organised system, the causation is more pronounced and intentional”. Good writing is “the cumulative result of all this repetitive choosing on the line level, those thousands of editing microdecisions”. This focus on process can sound occasionally like a reductive functionalism – each detail is there because it makes the story work. In reading, though, don’t we feel it the other way round: as if the story were only there so that for a moment we can contemplate the truth of the detail, of the experience?