It’s also a passionate argument for the enduring power of the classic Russian short story. It’s a guide to craft that is every bit as stunning as Stephen King’s On Writing it’s an insight into the mind of a great writer ( Lincoln in the Bardo won the 2017 Man Booker Prize) and it’s an extraordinary meditation on our lives as readers. The book ticks a pleasingly ridiculous number of boxes. In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain you get all Saunders’s commentary (which is both charming and addictive) and the original (translated) versions of seven short stories by four writers: Chekhov’s ‘In the Cart’, ‘The Darling’, and ‘Gooseberries’ Tolstoy’s ‘Master and Man’ and ‘Alyosha the Pot’ Gogol’s ‘The Nose’ and Turgenev’s ‘The Singers’. This has to be the best CliffsNotes ever, flawlessly designed for the test we all sit without realizing: life. Here we have a critically acclaimed, best-selling novelist, who also happens to be a highly sought-after creative writing teacher, setting out the curriculum of his over-subscribed ‘How to Write’ class in a way that is accessible to anyone…and the book reproduces the texts under discussion. This is such a superb idea that it’s a wonder a book like this has not cropped up before.
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