New York Times Bestseller , From the 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. Longlisted For The Pen, Diamonstein-spielvogel Award, One Of The Best Books Of The Year- The Washington Post, Npr, Time, San Francisco Chronicle, Esquire, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Town Country, The Rumpus, Electric Lit, Thrillist, Book Page, A worship song to writers and readers. Oprah Daily 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.