This is a grim scenario, although not, as Saunders points out, an untruthful one. And I love some short stories, too: the dark, funny magic of Kelly Link, the miraculously rich work of Deborah Eisenberg, the popular energy still coursing through short fiction in the sci-fi and fantasy worlds. I can already hear multiple friends and colleagues jumping up to protest “I love short stories!” in the slightly wistful tone of someone praising the virtues of vinyl LPs. Now they live in captivity in poorly selling collections stuck on bookshelves, hardly their native habitat. Appearing in almost every magazine, they diverted people during quiet evenings at home, on trains, and in doctors’ waiting rooms. Once, stories flourished at the fertile intersection of art and entertainment, much as television does now.
The literary short story is an awkward holdover. 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.Ī 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.Slate has relationships with various online retailers.īut note that deals can expire and all prices are subject to change.Īll prices were up to date at the time of publication. 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. 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 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. A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Lifeįor the last twenty years, George Saunders has been teaching a class on the Russian short story to his MFA students at Syracuse University.
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