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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For one, it was incredibly interesting to read Saunders' own perspectives on these oft-analysed stories. It's just so generous and gentle, so easy to get your arms around George Saunders' ideas of what makes good writing.

My personal writing approach, which I've suspected might be a little low-rent, is to say, "You know what would be cool? When the two men take shelter with their friend, while eating a delicious meal cooked and served by a beautiful woman, Ivan, the protagonist, tells a story whose moral seems to be this: happiness exists in the world only because poor people are forced to bear the burden of the happy. And the next is a few parts that I took away that completely meshes with my views of the meaning of life.Each story becomes an exemplar of a certain issue that Saunders feels is essential in short story writing--looking at patterns in storytelling, finding the 'heart of the story', and so on. George Saunders is the author of nine books, including the novel Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the Man Booker P He’s right, too – as well as appealingly modest – in thinking that the best teaching is “of value” straightforwardly, as writing itself somehow can’t be.

He shows how ambiguous endings keep us wondering, and sometimes have different meanings depending on the translator.

There's a mix of classic Russian stories, commentary that helped me think about what about the stories is working and how, and larger thoughts on writing fiction that always felt generous and helpful without getting pushy. 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. But I enjoyed it that way, exploring what Saunders loves about them as he champions their storycraft and beauty. I love that Saunders describes the rain as a kind of character in the story, a character who makes the protagonists unhappy (when they are caught in the rain), and a character who is locked out of the story at its end. In the case of “The Darling”, the English version got him quite derailed from the original in my opinion.

It allowed for a great range of interpretations and, while mine were not always the same as those by Saunders, I found his approach and angles fascinating.

She felt as though she had been living in these parts for a long, long time, for a hundred years, and it seemed to her that she knew every stone, every tree on the road from the town to her school. Pero volviendo a la cita del principio, Saunders no se decidió a escribir A Swim in a Pond in the Rain porque sentía que podía ayudar a los escritores que empiezan, sino para capturar la magia de aquellas clases en las que, además de leer y comentar lo leído, una pregunta flotaba constantemente en el aire: ¿qué pueden hacer estos relatos por nosotros? El libro toca muchos más temas: causalidad, descripciones, omisiones… pero Saunders nunca ofrece recetas ni reglas de oro, a veces incluso parece contradecirse: comentando un relato te habla de la economía inherente a esta forma literaria (todo lo que está tiene que estar por algo) y en el siguiente de las descripciones y digresiones que dan textura a la narración.

But nothing doing: the landowner’s a bit useless and ineffective, and anyway Marya’s preoccupied by her problems with the janitor at school, who is rude to her and hits the boys. We examine seven short stories of varying lengths and levels of realism or surrealism from the great 19th century Russians--Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol (all but Doestoyevesky who never wrote anything short enough to use in such an exemplar-driven writing class. It is to Saunders’ credit and his innate intelligence that, despite all, he sensed that something would not be quite right in abandoning the warm feelings about Olenka (“the more I know about her, the less inclined I feel to pass a too-harsh or premature judgment.The Saunders analytic style, so quippy and likable, somehow works perfectly out loud, and slightly less so on the page - but here comes a second confession: I think people who have taken an MFA, or a college writing class, may find less here, just because many of the reveals will be familiar to them.