A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life

Hardcover | 12 January 2021

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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.

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. 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. 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. 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. Funny, 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.

Industry Reviews

Praise for George Saunders

"Nothing has been read its last rites more frequently than the American short story. George Saunders proves, yet again, to be the form's one-man defibrillator."--Harper's Magazine

"No one writes more powerfully than George Saunders about the lost, the unlucky, the disenfranchised."--Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"Saunders makes you feel as though you are reading fiction for the first time."--Khaled Hosseini

"One of the most gifted, wickedly entertaining story writers around."--The New York Times Book Review

"Subversive, hilarious, and emotionally piercing . . . Few writers can encompass that range of adjectives, but Saunders is a true original--restlessly inventive, yet deeply humane."--Jennifer Egan

"The best short-story writer in English--not 'one of, ' not 'arguably, ' but the Best."--Mary Karr, Time

Praise for Lincoln in the Bardo

"It's not like anything anyone has written before. The author may have set out to write his first novel, but the work he completed is a genre unto itself."--The Atlantic

"A luminous feat of generosity and humanism."--Colson Whitehead, The New York Times Book Review

"Depicts a ferocious, keenly felt, and sometimes comic struggle. . . . Lincoln in the Bardo has great matters on its mind: freedom and slavery, the spirit and the body."--Thomas Mallon, The New Yorker

"A strikingly original production . . . that confounds our expectations of what a novel should look and sound like."--Ron Charles, The Washington Post

"Fans of Saunders's stories--some of the most original work in American history--have craved this book for a long time, and he has not disappointed. Saunders has disassembled the novel as a form and put it back together in a fascinating shape."--John Freeman, The Boston Globe

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