Or, rather, the incredible closeness of his attention to them makes them more interesting than my all-too-cursory first-reading ever could—what Saunders showed me is just how lame-arsed a reader I can be. Un día, convertidos en adolescentes llenos de granos e ideas propias, se van de casa no porque hayan alcanzado el grado de perfección que anticipaste, o porque tengan tanto de ti que ya no puedes darles más, sino por todo lo contrario y porque, sencillamente, ya toca. At the climax of “Master and Man”, wealthy merchant Vasili Andreevich, lost in a snowstorm at night and imagining the reality of his death for the first time, sees tall stalks of wormwood sticking out of the snow, “desperately tossing about under the pressure of the wind which beat it all to one side and whistled through it”.

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is 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. From the New York Times bestselling, Booker Prize–winning 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.I love that Saunders’ approach to teaching is to highlight this imperative; that’s where art gets made. His thoughts on reading, and he does teach this class in person, and what and why the author uses the words he does.

The stories touch on our encounters with bears, alligators and sharks, among other potentially scary things. George Saunders has been teaching a class at Syracuse University about the Russian short story, and this book, this very unique book, is his class. Tienen muchas cosas en común: son historias sencillas, claras, domésticas, con un propósito —que no es otro que plantear las grandes preguntas: ¿Cómo se supone que debemos vivir la vida? i reviewed each story on Goodreads separately, then added comments after reading Saunders's essay on each story. If it’s denied an adequate instrument (and we’re all denied that, at birth, some more than others), out`comes.Thus, Saunders' analysis of "how it's built" or "how the story works" could as easily fascinate a student of reading as a student of writing. 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. Chekhov’s “Gooseberries” is also a story about beauty, about the importance of beauty in life, and its nature. Still, there is sufficient ambivalence in Turgenev’s construction of the story to be open to his approach as perfectly valid too.

Here was her past and her present, and she could imagine no other future than the school, the road to the town and back … ” Saunders begins to speculate forwards, as any reader is bound to.Gogol’s contribution was to perform this throwing of himself against the fence in the part of town where the little men live, the sputtering, inarticulate men whose language can’t rise to the occasions but who still feel everything the big men (articulate, educated, at ease) feel.