A swim in a pond in the rain

Resumen del libro

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER From theBooker Prizewinning 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 ourselvesand our world today.LONGLISTED FOR THE PENDIAMONSTEIN-SPIELVOGEL AWARD ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, NPR, Time, San Francisco Chronicle, Esquire, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Town Country, The Rumpus, Electric Lit, Thrillist, BookPage A worship song to writers and readers.Oprah Daily

For the last twenty years, George Saunders has been teaching a class on the Russian short story to his MFA students at Syracuse University. In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, 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 its more relevant than ever in these turbulent times.In his introduction, Saunders writes, Were going to enter seven fastidiously constructed scale models of the world, made for a specific purpose that our time maybe doesnt fully endorse but that these writers accepted implicitly as the aim of artnamely, 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.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.

Biografía del autor

George Saunders es autor de las colecciones de relatos Guerracivilandia en ruinas, Pastoralia y Diez de diciembre, por la que fue finalista del National Book Award, de varios libros infantiles y ensayos y de Felicidades, por cierto (Seix Barral, 2020), que recoge el discurso que dio en la Universidad de Siracusa y que fue compartido más de un millón de veces en internet. Ha recibido becas de las fundaciones MacArthur y Guggenheim, el Premio PEN/Malamud a la excelencia en el relato corto y es miembro de la Academia Estadounidense de las Artes y las Ciencias. En 2013 fue nombrado una de las cien personas más influyentes del mundo por la revista Time. Lincoln en el Bardo (Seix Barral, 2018), su primera novela, fue galardonada con el Premio Man Booker en 2017, a la que seguiría la fábula Zorro 8 (Seix Barral, 2022). Actualmente imparte clases de escritura creativa en la Universidad de Siracusa, en Nueva York.