THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERPICKED BY THE SUNDAY TIMES GUARDIAN INDEPENDENT IRISH TIMES SPECTATOR TLS NEW STATESMAN MAIL ON SUNDAY I PAPER PROSPECT REVEW31 AND EVENING STANDARD AS A BOOK OF 2021A masterclass from a warm and engagingly enthusiastic companion Guardian Summer Reading Picks 2021This book is a delight and its about delight too. How necessary at our particular moment Tessa HadleyFrom the New York Timesbestselling Booker Prizewinning 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.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 its more relevant than ever in these turbulent times.In his introduction Saunders writes Were going to enter seven fastidiously constructed scale models of the world made for a specific purpose that our time maybe doesnt fully endorse but that these writers accepted implicitly as the aim of artnamely 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 g