This is such a superb idea that it’s a wonder a book like this has not cropped up before. Here we have a critically acclaimed, best-selling novelist, who also happens to be a highly sought-after creative writing teacher, setting out the curriculum of his over-subscribed ‘How to Write’ class in a way that is accessible to anyone… and the book reproduces the texts under discussion. Wow. This has to be the best York Notes ever, flawlessly designed for the exam we all sit without realising: life.
In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain you get all Saunders’s commentary (which is both charming and addictive) and the original (translated) versions of seven short stories by four writers: Chekhov’s ‘In the Cart’, ‘The Darling’, and ‘Gooseberries’; Tolstoy’s ‘Master and Man’ and ‘Alyosha the Pot’; Gogol’s ‘The Nose’; and Turgenev’s ‘The Singers’.
It’s rare to read a book and love it so much that you think it’s simply perfect
The book ticks a pleasingly ridiculous number of boxes.
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