Just finished A Swim in a Pond in the Rain and it was a mind-expander for me.
Saunders teaches creative writing at Syracuse University. This book repurposes some of his teaching for a more general audience by analyzing seven classic Russian short stories, sometimes sentence by sentence.
That may sound tedious and technical, but for me it was enlightening. There's so much going on beyond the story itself that it's thrilling to understand the other dimensions.
The book is for fiction writers, which I'll never be, but I feel it's improved my skills as a reader, and as a thinker.
George Saunders on the art of the short story - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33155945 - Oct 2022 (13 comments)
Ways of Thinking about Endings - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31596997 - June 2022 (9 comments)
George Saunders: what writers do when they write (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29450033 - Dec 2021 (11 comments)
How George Saunders Is Making Sense of the World - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27858976 - July 2021 (9 comments)
George Saunders on Story - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25769590 - Jan 2021 (1 comment)
George Saunders: what writers really do when they write - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13818706 - March 2017 (10 comments)