EyebrarianPrize winnersGet the app

Books › A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

Cover of A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

George Saunders

544 pages

An intimate, generous masterclass on the mechanics of fiction that doubles as a profound guide to being a more empathetic human.

Where to buyBooks like this

What it feels like

Reading this feels like pulling up a chair in the world's most welcoming, intellectually stimulating graduate seminar. The pace is steady and deliberate, inviting you to pause, read a classic Russian short story, and then return to dissect it with a guide who is endlessly generous and entirely devoid of academic pretension. The mood is cozy yet expansive, rooted in the warm, conversational tone of a master craftsman who genuinely loves his subject. As you move through the essays, the experience shifts from a technical breakdown of how sentences work into a deeply moving exploration of why we tell stories at all. It is a delight for writers and avid readers alike, offering a profound reminder that paying close attention to fiction is ultimately a way of paying closer, more empathetic attention to life itself.

Mood
  • intimate
  • contemplative
  • cozy
  • intellectually stimulating
Tone
  • generous
  • conversational
  • inquisitive
  • warm
  • earnest
Pace
steady
Themes
the mechanics of empathy · the purpose of art · human connection through storytelling · moral inquiry · the craft of writing
The writing
Unpretentious, delightfully conversational, and precise, reading exactly like a transcript of a masterclass led by your favorite professor.
The arc
Begins with a curious, technical dissection of narrative mechanics and expands into a profound, heart-opening meditation on how art teaches us to live.
Who it's for
Writers, avid readers, and anyone who wants to sit in a warm room and figure out exactly why a good story makes us feel more alive.
Content notes
  • discussions of mortality
  • existential dread

About the book

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 it’s more relevant than ever in these turbulent times.

In his introduction, Saunders writes, “We’re going to enter seven fastidiously constructed scale models of the world, made for a specific purpose that our time maybe doesn’t fully endorse but that these writers accepted implicitly as the aim of art—namely, 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.

Description from Open Library.

Books like A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

See why they match