En realidad, yo también me voy a contradecir; para Saunders sí hay una regla: leer lo que has escrito, leerlo y releerlo, cada vez como si no lo hubieras escrito tú, o tratando de sentir lo que sentiría otra persona al leerlo por primera vez. How are we supposed to live with joy in a world that seems to want us to love other people but then roughly separates us from them in the end, no matter what? Tolstoy wrote, "If once we admit---be it only for an hour or in some exceptional case---that anything can be more important than a feeling of love for our fellows, then there is no crime which we may not commit with easy minds. Since I haven’t read literary fiction since high school, I can’t speak to their representation for their class or culture, but Saunders does share some of his thoughts on each as well. But I enjoyed it that way, exploring what Saunders loves about them as he champions their storycraft and beauty.

Turgenev spent a good part of his life in the household of Pauline Viardot, one of the greatest opera singers at the time, and her husband. My life has been a constant negotiation and renegotiation of the truth—the truth about myself and the truth the world presents. 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.

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. A master class in reading great short stories by Russian masters, we first actually read a Saunders-chosen story. Happiness occurs in life almost by accident, like a swim in a pond, like a friend who happens to provide you shelter for the night during a rainstorm when you’re on a long journey, like a beautiful man making you a nice meal.

Nonetheless, as he points out, “even in English, shorn of those delights, they have worlds to teach us. También dice mucho sobre el libro y sobre lo lejos que está de un manual académico: es, como las clases, una conversación entre un escritor experimentado y aquellos que empiezan acerca de cómo “ofrecer valor al mundo. But to the good: Saunders has studied and taught these stories for decades, in various translations, and knows them intimately.

The Nose’ is the story that feels most uncharacteristic in the collection, perhaps because as satire, it takes everything less seriously. George Saunders, conocido sobre todo como escritor de relatos cortos, ha sido profesor de escritura creativa en la Universidad de Syracuse durante los últimos 20 años, un programa que incluye un “popular” curso sobre relatos breves rusos del siglo XIX. Or maybe they're just not fans of George Saunders ever since he dragged poor Lincoln into the damn Bardo (which we had to look up to discover "in some schools of Buddhism, bardo, antarābhava, or chūu is an intermediate, transitional, or liminal state between death and rebirth.

Even ‘The Soulmate” would be better by playing on the Russian relationship between ‘Dushechka” (the original title) and dusha (the soul). I enjoyed reading the stories themselves, but even more than that, I enjoyed reading Saunders break it all down and share his thoughts on what makes each story work, and how variations from the story would alter it. These stories we've just read were written during an incredible seventy-year artistic renaissance in Russia. That’s a pretty hopeful model of human interaction: two people, mutually respectful, leaning in, one speaking so as to compel, the other listening, willing to be charmed. 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.

Does Drakkar Noir tell you what combination of smells one needs to smear all over themselves to make themselves irresistible to women everywhere? If the stories’ depth that he argues for were so prima-facie obvious it could preclude the greater value of this book. Tienen muchas cosas en común: son historias sencillas, claras, domésticas, con un propósito —que no es otro que plantear las grandes preguntas: ¿Cómo se supone que debemos vivir la vida? As Saunders’s notes, the story “keeps qualifying itself until it qualifies itself right out of the business of judgement. Qué me ofrece a mí, simple lector —además de descubrir esos siete cuentos escritos por los maestros del género—, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain?