THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERPICKED BY THE SUNDAY TIMES GUARDIAN INDEPENDENT IRISH TIMES SPECTATOR TLS NEW STATESMAN MAIL ON SUNDAY I PAPER PROSPECT REVEW31 AND EVENING STANDARD AS A BOOK OF 2021A masterclass from a warm and engagingly enthusiastic companion Guardian Summer Reading Picks 2021This book is a delight and its about delight too. How necessary at our particular moment Tessa HadleyFrom the New York Timesbestselling Booker Prizewinning 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 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.