A Swim in the Pond in the Rain
2021
Literary Criticism
A reader's companion drawn from Saunders' long-running Syracuse MFA class on the nineteenth-century Russian short story. Saunders walks through seven stories — four by Chekhov, plus one each from Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol — pausing every page or two to ask what the story is doing, why it works, and what choices the writer made. The title comes from a scene in Chekhov's "Gooseberries," and the book is part craft manual, part love letter to a particular tradition of short fiction.