This book is a delight, and it’s about delight too. How necessary, at our particular moment.

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.

[Saunders] is moved by an evangelical ardor where fiction is concerned, intent on how it can help us 'become more loving, more open, less selfish, more present, less delusional,' as he put it in a viral commencement speech. These particular hopes have never been more precisely, joyfully or worryingly articulated than in his new book, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain.

... maybe I’m biased as a former English major, but A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is refreshing, warm and educational in the best sense of the word. For me, the best non-fiction books — like the best teachers — open your eyes and engage you with personality and passion. And as Saunders takes us through six short stories by Russian masters, we learn to read differently. We slow down. We feel his passion. And we ask questions.

... craft books tend to read like invitations to a kind of shared suffering. But if Saunders’ writing guide is no more helpful, it’s funnier and more open-hearted.

Part intro to Russian literature, part musings on craft, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is all pleasure.

At times Saunders's commentaries read like exactly what they are, dressed-up lecture notes — perhaps of limited interest to those not hell-bent on getting published in The New Yorker. Often he strains a little too hard to make it 'FUN!!'.

... a true gift to writers and serious readers.

Welcome to Man Booker Prize winner George Saunders’s classroom at Syracuse University.

George Saunders’ surprisingly affirmative new book is a bit like being taken around a literary museum by a curator. His Old Masters are Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy and Gogol, and the book presents seven works by them, and then Saunders’ insights about them having taught a course on the Russian short story at Syracuse University for many years. That said, even these Old Masters knew a thing or twelve about suffering.

... warm and inviting.

Saunders, a former petroleum engineer, likes to disassemble and analyse, yet this is not a dry, technical guide on how to write.

It is that restrained but persistent note of sentimental humanism that is most noticeably illuminated in Saunders’ attentive readings of the Russian masters, though the parameters of the book are set by its practical emphasis. Saunders goes out of his way to present himself as an affable guide. He adopts an informal tone, illustrating key points with anecdotes and humorous analogies that have presumably been refined over many years in the seminar room.

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is a failure on both its practical and philosophical levels. It doesn’t really serve as a useful guide to writing short stories and it doesn’t serve as a good philosophical justification for why one should want to do that. Furthermore, it seems to willfully misunderstand the writers it places on a pedestal, whose lives and stories have the kind of thorny complexity of which Saunders can only work out a pale imitation.

[A] flat, uncomplicated, and depoliticized background as essential to understanding the fundamentals of the craft of storytelling.

... the eminent short story writer and Booker Prize-winner George Saunders comes to the rescue with A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, an enthralling, clear-eyed, between-the-covers seminar on seven classic Russian stories and what they reveal about the form--and about human nature.

... lively, edifying essays.

... a hugely fascinating and inspiring study of seven stories by four great Russians.

... a warm introduction to the Russian masters of literature—warm as a house party.

George Saunders deems his delightful readings of seven stories by Chekhov, Gogol, Turgenev and Tolstoy non-academic, and they are all the better for that.

... [Saunders] instills the collected fictions with a new layer of richness. That said, taking these stories a 'page at a time,' as the author himself acknowledges, is a bit tedious. I, for one, was glad that for the rest of the way, Saunders saves his comments for afterwards.

this volume serves as a mini-anthology of great Russian fiction from the 1830s to the 1900s.

This is no history of 19th-century Russian literature; the Booker Prize-winner is clear that he neither reads Russian, nor studies its literature systematically.

... A Swim in the Pond in the Rain is not a work of biography — or of scholarship. Although all of the stories predate the Russian Revolution and refer to very specific, time-stamped issues in Russian culture and history, Saunders admits that he can’t address questions about the stories’ social context. 'These questions are above my pay grade. (Even asking them has made me a little anxious.)' What he can do is share his idiosyncratic, high-spirited way of approaching fiction. Here, it is emphatically, delightfully enough..

Saunders writes in an easy-breezy style, with lots of silly anecdotes and self-deprecation. Whether or not this appeals to you is probably a question of personal taste. I feel that Saunders is trying a bit too hard to be the cool teacher that everyone likes, and occasionally while reading I wanted to rebel and shout, ‘OK Boomer!’ from the back of the class. On the other hand, it’s a light, easy, fun-filled read, which takes its subject seriously, but not too reverentially. Saunders says things like, ‘Write it like Tolstoy. Use, you know, a lot of facts. Ha ha.’ He makes the Russians feel approachable..

...it is not the typical how-to writing guide. The closest comparison might be Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer from 2006. But while Prose focuses on close reading for craft techniques, Saunders aims for something larger: what stories do to us, how and why.

... the book very much feels like a class.

... billed as a master class in how to read and write, is effectively two books in one: seven classic Russian short stories by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol paired with funny, lively, profound essays by Saunders explaining their art, craft and enduring appeal.

A Swim in the Pond in the Rain is a lesson in looking closely at narrative to understand how and why it can weave such a spell.

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, is a distillation of what he tries to impart to his students. It’s difficult to name a contemporary writer whose work departs further from the stereotype of the overcrafted, MFA-boilerplate, New Yorker story than Saunders, the inventive, playful, idiosyncratic author of Tenth of December. Yet in this book, rather than advising his readers (and his students) how to write as far outside of the box as he does, Saunders seems surprisingly inclined to help them squeeze themselves into it.

Saunders’s procedure in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is straightforward.

Admirers of Lincoln in the Bardo (2017) and Saunders’ equally imaginative short story collections will discover the full scope of his passion for and knowledge of literature in his deeply inquisitive, candid, funny, and philosophical analysis of seven stories, each included here, by his Russian mentors.

... [a] thrilling literary lesson.

... [a] superb mix of instruction and literary criticism.