a swim in a pond in the rain george saunders

These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.Įveryone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). “The resistance in the stories,” he writes, “is quiet, at a slant, and comes from perhaps the most radical idea of all: that every human being is worthy of attention and that the origins of every good and evil capability of the universe may be found by observing a single, even very humble, person and the turnings of his or her mind.”Ī master of contemporary fiction joyously assesses some of the best of the 19th century.

Once we become accustomed to reading like he reads, we proceed through the stories with great joy, anticipating even further delights with his explications to follow. Saunders is always careful not to confuse the internal workings of a story with authorial intent. The author seeks to answer “the million-dollar question: What makes a reader keep reading?” As he shows throughout this thrilling literary lesson, the answer has little to do with conventional notions of theme and plot it’s more about energy, efficiency, intentionality, and other “details of internal dynamics.” Saunders explains how what might seem like flaws often work in the story’s favor and how we love some stories even more because of-rather than in spite of-those flaws. Opening with Chekhov’s “The Cart,” Saunders shows just how closely we’ll be reading-a page or two of the original text at a time followed by multiple pages of commentary. All stories are included in full, and readers need not be familiar with Russian literature to find this plan richly rewarding. This is the book version of that class, illuminating seven stories by the masters: three by Chekhov, two by Tolstoy, and one each by Turgenev and Gogol.

“Some of the best moments of my life…have been spent teaching that Russian class,” he writes. Though Saunders is known mainly as an inventive, award-winning writer-of novels, short stories, cultural criticism-he has also taught creative writing at Syracuse since 1997. The renowned author delivers a master class on the Russian short story and on the timeless value of fiction.

A swim in a pond in the rain george saunders