Saunders argues that the short story is not a minor art form. His writing students, he explains, “arrive already wonderful.” Saunders’s goal is to help them “become defiantly and joyfully themselves.” “A Swim in a Pond in the Rain,” is drawn from the lectures Saunders delivers year after year to his graduate writing students at Syracuse University in his Russian Literature in Translation class. In Saunders’s delightful new book of essays, “A Swim in a Pond in the Rain” Saunders tries to articulate just how Chekhov makes the mysterious, luminous, numinous, and magical happen. George Saunders, who teaches short story writing at Syracuse University, like most short story writers, is interested in happiness, the meaning of life, and in how Chekhov pulls it off. Is it possible to write about the meaning of life and happiness in less than ten pages? Anton Chekhov, in his humble story, “Gooseberries” manages to do just that.
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