THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER'A masterclass from a warm and engagingly enthusiastic companion' Guardian 'This book is a delight, and it's about delight too. How necessary, at our particular moment' Tessa Hadley________________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 university students. In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, he shares a version of that class with us. Paired with iconic short stories by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol, these essays are for anyone interested in how fiction works and why it's more relevant than ever in these turbulent times.Funny, frank and rigorous, A Swim in the Pond in the Rain ultimately shows how great fiction can change a person's life and become a benchmark of their moral and ethical beliefs.'Part intro to Russian literature, part musings on craft, A Swim in the Pond in the Rain is all pleasure'Financial Times