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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Every chapter articulated a truth a book that, as an avid reader, I had felt before and never knew for sure that anyone else shared.

Good writing works in intricate relationship with a reader’s expectations, raising them and leading them on, then sidestepping or surpassing them. We can reduce all of writing to this: we read a line, have a reaction to it, trust (accept) that reaction, and do something in response, instantaneously, by intuition. There’s the host who looks a little like an artist and a little like a professor, and whose dirt rolls off him in the pond the color of paint and ink. Saunders’s insights into what makes them work and why they are considered great pieces of art were also interesting—and often very funny. Though I've enjoyed Saunders' work in the past, I wasn't eager to pick up anyone's hefty analysis of Russian short stories.

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. There is one exception, though, when the validity of interpretation can be questioned because it’s based on the utterly inadequate translation of one of the crucial sentences in the story.

Lo que hace Saunders con sus alumnos y con los lectores de A Swim in a Pond in the Rain es mantener una conversación abierta y honesta sobre lectura. However, it also allows Saunders to digress a bit on following one’s own inner style/voice for trueness. The men admire her beauty even as she does all the work to make them comfortable, highlighting Ivan’s hypocrisy. También son relatos “revolucionarios”, aunque no en el sentido de literatura política sino de una cierta resistencia silenciosa contra un sistema represivo y clasista. Or maybe they're just not fans of George Saunders ever since he dragged poor Lincoln into the damn Bardo (which we had to look up to discover "in some schools of Buddhism, bardo, antarābhava, or chūu is an intermediate, transitional, or liminal state between death and rebirth.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. To study the way we read is to study the way the mind works: the way it evaluates a statement for truth, the way it behaves in relation to another mind (i. Then, Saunders would comment in a separate short chapters -“afterthoughts” about his own process of writing. Still, there is sufficient ambivalence in Turgenev’s construction of the story to be open to his approach as perfectly valid too.