George Saunders, conocido sobre todo como escritor de relatos cortos, ha sido profesor de escritura creativa en la Universidad de Syracuse durante los últimos 20 años, un programa que incluye un “popular” curso sobre relatos breves rusos del siglo XIX. And if that’s the only way we can read foreign literature, short of learning just about every language in which the originals we’d love to read were written, it’s still better than not reading them at all.

Qué me ofrece a mí, simple lector —además de descubrir esos siete cuentos escritos por los maestros del género—, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain? It was a pleasure-- first, just to read these stories and savor the various flavors, voices and styles. Yes, it sounds like it would be tedious, banal, tiresome, irksome, but, no, it's the complete opposite of that.find new paths for the story form to go down; to make stories that are as powerful as these Russian stories but that, in their voice and form and concerns, are new, meaning that they respond to the things history has given us to know about life on earth in the years since these Russians were here….

The title essay, “A Swim in a Pond in the Rain” is a study of Anton Chekhov’s transcendent story, “Gooseberries.

Gooseberries” is brilliant because it offers us so many potential versions of a good life, in so short a space. But nothing doing: the landowner’s a bit useless and ineffective, and anyway Marya’s preoccupied by her problems with the janitor at school, who is rude to her and hits the boys. And alas, the Summer I was planning traveling abroad through Europe seems to be falling through as every time I mention it to my dear wife steam shoots out of both her ears and her face turns an alarming shade of red. Well, that’s the question we’ve been asking all along, as we’ve been watching our minds read these Russian stories. When he talks about it, about the act of writing, as opposed to the art, you get the sense that he's given himself to it.