George Saunders taught a class on the nineteenth-century Russian short story at Syracuse for twenty years, and this book is that class on the page. Seven stories in translation, three by Chekhov and the rest by Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol, each printed in full and then taken apart. With “In the Cart” he stops you after every page and asks what you now expect and why, walking the story forward the way a reader actually meets it. The essays that follow argue about structure, escalation, and what makes a story feel true rather than engineered. He is candid that the answers are provisional, and he keeps returning to craft as a moral matter, on the theory that how you handle a character on the page is not separate from how you regard people.
A Swim in a Pond in the Rain