A wonderful book … This book is a delight … I love the warmth with which he writes about this teaching, and agree wholeheartedly … All this makes Saunders’s book very different from just another “how to” creative writing manual, or just another critical essay … One of the pleasures of this book is feeling his own thinking move backwards and forwards, between the writer dissecting practice and the reader entering in through the spell of the words, to dwell inside the story

Saunders is such a wise and amiable teacher … A page-turner

Luminously perceptive

A masterclass in how to be human … unfailingly, often thrillingly illuminating … Published any time, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain would be a joyous reminder that fiction is “the most effective mode of mind-to-mind communication ever devised”. Published now, it feels like vital and civilising corrective to the pretend certainties of public life – and, increasingly, of our personal lives too

One of the most accurate and beautiful depictions of what it is like to be inside the mind of a writer that I’ve ever read

The Russian greats truly shine in this account; but Saunders is the real star. His way of expressing himself is simultaneously supremely intellectual and jovially down-to-earth. It’s rare to read a book and love it so much that you think it’s simply perfect. A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is that book

Joins a long tradition of using Russian literature as a guide to life … Practical and playful … it also probes exactly how narrative techniques make us more alert, attentive and sympathetic in reading books and the world around us

By the end Saunders is wondering if there is indeed any point in writing at all. I won’t spoil his conclusion.
Suffice to say, the hairs on the back of my neck were alert

Suffused with wry humour … Not an academic interpretation, but a reader’s companion. I was pleasurably absorbed from start to finish

The Booker-winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo considers the art of fiction through seven classic Russian short stories by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy and Gogol

The combination of Saunders’s piercing mind and the Russian subjects being Anton Chekhov, Ivan Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy and Nikolai Gogol promises to be a highbrow treat for fans of literature, and a book offering deep insights into storytelling and how narrative functions

A literary masterclass

But the real star of A Swim isn’t Chekhov or Turgenev or Tolstoy or Gogol – it’s Saunders himself … This book will quite simply make you a better, more observant and more understanding reader

Part intro to Russian literature, part musings on craft, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is all pleasure

A worship song to writers and readers

His warmth, enthusiasm and homespun metaphors – all part of that “writerly charm” – banish any sense of the chilly, mechanistic Fiction Lab … Gleefully overshoots its brief as a technical manual or how-to guide … A Swim in a Pond in the Rain generates more fun, more wit, more sympathetic sense, than we have any right to hope for from a 400-page critical study

There should be more books like this

A masterclass from a warm and engagingly enthusiastic companion

A masterclass in short fiction by one of the finest teachers alive… It is a joyously civilised primer on how to write – and live – better

Warm, playful and acutely perceptive

Not just astute, humane lit crit but an inspirational manifesto for the art of fiction

A masterclass in writing … a real treat

[I] loved George Saunders’s A Swim in a Pond in the Rain … Genial, generous and illuminating … He is a great teacher as well as a great practitioner, and makes you see more

A tin of caviar sort of a book … Saunders guides, prods, nudges, urges you to disagree … It will stay with you and transform how you read story by story, sentence by sentence