biNEW YORK TIMES /iBESTSELLER From the Booker Prize winning author ofi Lincoln in the Bardo /iandi Tenth of December/i comes a literary master class on what makes great stories work and what they can tell us about ourselves and our world today./bbrbrbLONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/DIAMONSTEIN-SPIELVOGEL AWARD ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: iThe Washington Post,/i NPR, iTime, San Francisco Chronicle,/i iEsquire/i, iMilwaukee Journal Sentinel,/i iTown & Country,/i iThe Rumpus, Electric Lit, Thrillist,/i iBookPage/i [A] worship song to writers and readers. iOprah Daily/i/bbrbrFor the last twenty years, George Saunders has been teaching a class on the Russian short story to his MFA students at Syracuse University. In iA Swim in a Pond in the Rain/i, 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 it s more relevant than ever in these turbulent times.brbrIn his introduction, Saunders writes, We re going to enter seven fastidiously constructed scale models of the world, made for a specific purpose that our time maybe doesn t fully endorse but that these writers accepted implicitly as the aim of art namely, 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.brbriA Swim in a Pond in the Rain /iis 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.