I was sitting outdoors at a cafe (reading) when a young woman approached me and said (beaming) “That’s a great book!”

Folks, this is a rare thing. I get complimented on my choice of attire or accessories significantly more often than I get complimented on my choice of book.

However, it must be said that this was not just any book. This was a book by George Saunders. I have a family member who lights up at the mere mention of his name, and I do, too: The young woman who approached me at the cafe is not alone in her enthusiasm.

Come to think of it, the last time I received a compliment on my choice of book, I was reading a work of classic literature by a nineteenth-century Russian (I was reading Dostoevsky at a Starbucks; this was years and years ago).

This is relevant because the book I’m sharing with you today is by George Saunders, and it includes not only brilliant musings by Saunders, but also seven short stories by four nineteenth-century Russian literary masters (Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol).

Secrets of the Short Story for Readers and Writers

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, by George Saunders, is a work of nonfiction by an author who’s famous for writing fiction. Ever since it was published in 2021, I’ve been hearing that it’s very much in sync with the current literary zeitgeist. I finally got around to reading it, and I’m so glad I did.

We book readers love our nineteenth-century Russian literary masters, but who can tell why? The reasons behind our adoration is a complete mystery to most of us. The phrase “for some unknown reason” appears regularly in classic Russian literature (I’m thinking especially of Fathers and Sons by Turgenev, in which, if I remember correctly, the phrase seems to appear on every other page). The phrase can also be applied to us moderns: For some unknown reason, we love us some nineteenth-century Russian literature.

Astoundingly, the reasons behind our love is not completely unknown to George Saunders. He has cracked the code, the interior workings of the short story. Saunders is not only a short story master in his own right, he also teaches creative writing at Syracuse University in New York. In this book, he has transformed his course on the nineteenth-century Russian short story in translation (which is offered specifically to MFA in creative writing students) into a master class in the form of a book.

Folks, this is a rare thing. Writers usually have to spend thousands of dollars to get this kind of actionable, high-quality information about comprehending great works of literature and writing at the highest level of mastery. But now you can get it for a mere $20, or $0 with a library card. And bonus—you don’t need to fill out fancy applications, bite your nails for months, quit your job, or move to Iowa.

In Sync with the Current Literary Zeitgeist

What on earth did I mean when I wrote, a few paragraphs ago, “in sync with the current literary zeitgeist”? I wrote that for some unknown reason. Well, the reason probably is—Saunders’ writing style, as well as the themes of his writing, are perfectly in sync with our times. If you are preoccupied by something about modern life, he has probably addressed it somewhere in his fiction or nonfiction.

For example, some of his fiction centers around theme parks gone wrong. The theme park is such a modern phenomenon. He takes this idea and twists it in such a way that it reveals all the power and all the travesty of theme parks. And he highlights the way people tend to behave like people, that is to say, irrationally.

That’s just one example. All of his writing seems up-to-the-moment. That even includes his fictional reflections on history, as well as his nonfictional book about short stories written long ago, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain.

Here’s an excerpt from the introduction of A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. Note how he brings dusty history into the modern moment, making stories written so long ago relevant to the modern reader. Note also how his sense of humor would fit right in with the humor often found in social media memes, despite his distain of our too-quick culture:

“We live, as you may have noticed, in a degraded era, bombarded by facile, shallow, agenda-laced, too rapidly disseminated information bursts. We’re about to spend some time in a realm where it is assumed that, as the great (twentieth-century) Russian short story master Isaac Babel put it, ‘no iron spike can pierce a human heart as icily as a period in the right place.’ 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: 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? How can we feel any peace when some people have everything and others have nothing? How are we supposed to live with joy in a world that seems to want us to love other people but then roughly separates us from them in the end, no matter what?

“(You know, those cheerful, Russian kinds of big questions.)”

I disagree with the beginning of this passage. I do not think we live “in a degraded era.” I’ll explain why I think this (no, my head is not in the sand; I know what’s been happening in the world lately) in my Wednesday Patreon post. Subscribe here to read this upcoming article. You can even subscribe for one month, catch up on all the posts I’ve made over the past several months, and then unsubscribe. That’s not cheating, at least not in my book. Do whatever feels right to you. This blog is run through community support, and now that I’ve been DOGE’ed, this is my job. THANK YOU for your support!

And now back to Saunders. I agree with everything else in this passage, from “bombarded by facile, shallow, agenda-laced, too rapidly disseminated . . .” through to the end.

Did you notice how the writing of this passage is simultaneously intellectually literary and up-to-the-moment? Saunders intermingles fancy old words like “facile” and “fastidiously” with modern slag expressions like “down here” (meaning here on earth, presumably as opposed to heaven, but said in a cheeky, slightly irreverent way) and modern scientific terminology like “scale models.” Intermingling all these types of words and expressions to create a seamless passage is an intricate dance that most writers can’t pull off. I adore him for it. And if you like this style, the entire book is written this way (except for the parts written by the Russian masters, which are also obviously phenomenal).

Should You Care If You’re Not a Writer?

Yes. While A Swim in a Pond in the Rain has obvious important practical uses for creative writers, especially short story writers, the book is also a fabulous guide for anyone who has read a short story, found themselves strangely affected by it, but couldn’t place their finger on why; or what they learned from the story, if anything at all; or what the story is even supposed to mean, or do, if anything at all.

Saunders is especially helpful when he explains aspects of nineteenth-century Russian society that I didn’t quite get when I read the story, and when he expounds on translation and how it can obscure the meaning of a story. But he’s also extremely helpful when he points out things that were fully in my power to notice on my own, and yet didn’t. (Sometimes this is because you need to read a story dozens of times to fully grasp certain aspects of it, which a teacher will tend to if they teach the same class over and over. This is why teachers sometimes have insights that their students don’t, even in the case [not Saunders’ case, presumably] that teacher and students are at the same skill level.)

I highly recommend A Swim in a Pond in the Rain to both readers and writers. Also, I learned from that young woman at the cafe, as well as from my family member, that Saunders has a Substack newsletter, which they both raved about. Apparently, the newsletter is similar in content and style to A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. I haven’t yet read it myself, but it seems worth checking out. In the meantime, this book was so fabulous that I may add it to my list of the top 10 books of nonfiction of the past 10 years. No promises yet, though—I need to go back through that list and see if I can bear to bump another book off of it!

Have you ever been complimented on your choice of book?

Featured in this blog post: A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders Buy it now