A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: From the Man Booker Prize-winning, New York Times-bestselling author of Lincoln in the Bardo

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Well, in terms of the complexity, the only complex thing in that character is his natural simplicity. And here's Saunders giving clear and matter-of-fact lessons on seven incredible short stories and explaining exactly why they are so great without diminishing the inexplicable aspects of story. En estos días, en los que a pesar de estar tan interconectados gracias a la tecnología es tan fácil sentir que perdemos el vínculo con lo que realmente importa, la lectura ayuda a conectar de nuevo o, al menos, a creer que esa conexión sigue siendo posible. It's just so generous and gentle, so easy to get your arms around George Saunders' ideas of what makes good writing. It is accepted by you that Daunt Books has no control over additional charges in relation to customs clearance.

Desde un punto de vista de la creación literaria, los fundamentos de la escritura de relatos breves están presentes en estos cuentos, claramente expuestos. No longer do you need to be worried or stressed about participating/taking notes/preparing for an exam; all you are doing is listening and enjoying. Inviertes tiempo y esfuerzo en su desarrollo, pero cada vez son más diferentes de aquellos que imaginaste al principio, cada vez menos tuyos y más de ellos mismos.

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. He's been teaching this class for many years, and he finally decided to make the class public through this book. My daughter and I are also both writing (parallel) stories this summer based on our trip to the Southland to complete our having visited all fifty US States!

My favorite story was Tolstoy's "Master and Man" where characters make repetitive bad choices, and that makes the story work.unfailingly, often thrillingly illuminating … Published any time, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain would be a joyous reminder that fiction is “the most effective mode of mind-to-mind communication ever devised”. The servant girl is, in Saunders’s view, “a reminder that beauty is an unavoidable, essential part of life; it keeps showing up and we keep responding to it, our theoretical positions notwithstanding, and if we ever stop responding to it, we have become more corpse than person.

If we are moved, Turgenev has, via this story that claims that emotional power is the highest aim of art and can be obtained even in the face of clumsy craft, demonstrated that very thing. Hace unos pocos años, después de terminar una de las clases (digamos que con polvo de tiza flotando en el aire otoñal, un radiador anticuado rechinando en la esquina, el sonido de la banda de música desfilando lejos, en alguna parte),” afirma Saunders “me di cuenta de algunos de los mejores momentos de mi vida, aquellos momentos durante lo cuales he sentido que tenía algo de valor que ofrecer al mundo, habían sucedido en aquella clase sobre literatura rusa. También dice mucho sobre el libro y sobre lo lejos que está de un manual académico: es, como las clases, una conversación entre un escritor experimentado y aquellos que empiezan acerca de cómo “ofrecer valor al mundo. Good writing works in intricate relationship with a reader’s expectations, raising them and leading them on, then sidestepping or surpassing them. If you’ve never had the pleasure of taking a course in creative writing from George Saunders, this is your chance to take advantage of what he has to share without spending a semester in Syracuse, New York.A book that achieves exactly what it sets out to, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is essentially a writing class in book form. For he does just the opposite of what many students feel teachers and professors do when they perform an analysis (or a "close reading") of a text: rather than "kill it", or "kill the enjoyment" of the work, he brings it to life, perhaps makes it even better than the author himself intended. It was a pleasure-- first, just to read these stories and savor the various flavors, voices and styles. Saunders acknowledges the reader must be fretting with impatience, and notes that the better the story, the more annoying the exercise is.

Saunders is a patient, brilliant, funny teacher who at the end of the day says “well that’s just what I think, you don’t have to approach things as I do, jettison everything you don’t need” and I appreciate that non-didactic approach to life. Based upon my Russian reading, Olenka came across as the kind, slightly unfortunate and absolutely selfless person.

Perhaps that was my life lesson from this masterclass - to let the things take me where I have to go. 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. También son relatos “revolucionarios”, aunque no en el sentido de literatura política sino de una cierta resistencia silenciosa contra un sistema represivo y clasista. Sí, el relato es un formato literario exigente —incluso cruel, despiadado— como lo pueda ser un chiste, una canción, una nota de suicido: el autor se lo juega todo a una tirada. I've tried to be as clear and persuasive as possible, telling you what you should be noticing, pointing out certain technical features, offering my best explanation of why "we" were moved in this place or that, and so on.