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

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With his newest book, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, Saunders pretty much publishes the MFA class on writing that he has taught at Syracuse for over twenty years.

The tone is knowledgeable but casual — Saunders invites his students and readers to disagree with him (to employ their own “shit detectors” and trust their own tastes) — and I ended this book feeling both educated and entertained; it receives my highest recommendation. It made me think again about many issues such as the process of translation, the value of professional creative writing programs (MFA) and what is that thing that makes a story special. But this attracted me in a friend’s feed because of it being short stories; the stories are from the greats in Russian fiction; Russia being what it is, I thought her literature might give me more insight into her people; and while I seem to do a lot of reviewing, sometimes I feel like I lack the tools to be as specific as I would like. George Saunders has been teaching a class at Syracuse University about the Russian short story, and this book, this very unique book, is his class. Turgenev spent a good part of his life in the household of Pauline Viardot, one of the greatest opera singers at the time, and her husband.

Skaz in a traditional Russian meaning is a story based upon a rural legend or a fairy tale which is often being retold orally. And the way that Chekhov announces the servant girl’s beauty, without having to describe her at all, is both a comment of Chekhov’s genius and Saunders’s brilliant powers of observation. I want to thank you for allowing me to guide you rather bossily through these stories, for letting me show you how I read them, why I love them. 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. Even those who are happy are not immune to unhappiness because unhappiness and death visits us all in the end.

Y con cada cambio, reevaluar las consecuencias en la historia de esa palabra que ha aparecido o desaparecido. Every story is narrated by someone, and since everyone has a viewpoint, every story is misnarrated (is narrated subjectively).Others might get bogged down in certain stories or be tempted to skip over them (and if so, why bother? But anyone can google "how to hit a curveball" and be informed that a hitter must "identify the spin" and "hit the bad ones but let the good ones go by" and so on, and we can all be happing about that on our way to the batting cage, but once we get there, we'll find that, nevertheless, some of us can hit a curveball and some of us can't. George Saunders is the author of nine books, including the novel Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the Man Booker P Even ‘The Soulmate” would be better by playing on the Russian relationship between ‘Dushechka” (the original title) and dusha (the soul). It’s just a matter of: (1) noticing ourselves responding to a work of art (where we were before we read it and where we were after) and (2) getting better at articulating that response.