His closing note for writers is to “go forth and do what you please.” Saunders’s generous teachings-and the classics they’re based on-are sure to please. It comes from the authors commentary regarding one of the short stories, 'Gooseberries,' number six of the seven. The writing advice, meanwhile, is expansive: revising, he writes, involves intuition, and he views a story as a conversation. That’s all a story is, really: a continual system of escalation.” Each story is presented in full, along with Saunders’s commentary: on Chekhov’s “In the Cart,” Saunders asks, “why we keep reading a story,” and on Tolstoy’s “Master and Man,” he writes that facts can “draw us in” when the “language isn’t particularly elevated or poetic.” Saunders’s teaching style, much like his fiction, is thoughtful with touches of whimsy, as when he breaks the action of Turgenev’s “The Singers” into a table and compares the short story writer to a roller-coaster designer. A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class by George Saunders review The stories of Chekhov, Tolstoy, Gogol and Turgenev have a lot to teach us about life. George Saunders is the Tom Hanks of letters profoundly gifted and profoundly humane, so much so that we forget to miss the darkness and danger that can substitute for distinction in the art of others. In surveying seven stories by Anton Chekhov, Ivan Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy, and Nikolai Gogol, Saunders concludes that the secret to crafting powerful fiction is, “Always be escalating.

Saunders ( Lincoln in the Bardo) offers lessons from his graduate-level seminar on the Russian short story in this superb mix of instruction and literary criticism.

A swim in a pond in the rain review