George Saunders is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of ten books, including Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the Man Booker Prize; Congratulations, by the way; Tenth of December, a finalist for the National Book Award; The Braindead Megaphone; and the critically acclaimed short story collections CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, Pastoralia, and In Persuasion Nation. He teaches in the creative writing program at Syracuse University.
From the New York Times bestselling, Booker Prize–winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo and Tenth of December comes a literary master class on what makes great stories work and what they can tell us about ourselves—and our world today.
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.
##跟著作者一行行一段段地讀七篇俄羅斯小說,這個過程雖然由於不停地發問探索感到很纍,但是好滿足。有些東西沒有人指路自己是完全不會想到的,即使其中摻雜瞭作者的一些主觀,也有很大的啓發甚至是...感動。啊,浩瀚星河啊,浩瀚星河。
評分 評分 評分##讀完此書大概會成為更好的短篇小說讀者吧,Saunders 有讓我學會關注小說作者的意圖,以及反省自己對不同風格不同腦洞的作品是不是一直以來太不寬容瞭,畢竟閱讀短篇小說就是和作者在建立連結,和作者筆下的人物建立連結呀。自己竟也想多寫一寫。
評分##魅力是俄羅斯文學給的,契訶夫太偉大瞭。The author’s analysis is inspiring as well.
評分 評分##再一次證明,我讀不瞭任何教寫作和教閱讀的書 我無法接受它把短篇拆分成一段一段,然後分析,可以說跟我上高中語文課一模一樣 閱讀過程真的讓我夢迴高中,太痛苦瞭
評分 評分##講寫作的部分讓人有些暴躁,作者非常愛用metaphor,過分愛用瞭;但作為讀者的部分還是很有意思的。讀罷Gooseberries我對契柯夫真是佩服得五體投地嗚嗚嗚。
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