Instead, it was if we were just having a conversation between peers or between student and teacher, respectful, casual, comfortable, desirous of learning from one another. The title essay, “A Swim in a Pond in the Rain” is a study of Anton Chekhov’s transcendent story, “Gooseberries. This is a resistance literature, written by progressive reformers in a repressive culture, under constant threat of censorship… The resistance in the stories is quiet, at a slant, and comes from perhaps the most radical idea of all: that every human being is worthy of attention and that the origins of every good and evil capability of the universe may be found by observing a single, even very humble, person and the turnings of his or her mind.

I wish Saunders would move in next door and join our local book club and teach seniors at our local junior college. Ivan, the protagonist, is a maker of marks, (and by extension, so are we all maker of marks; this is why the humble farmer friend in Chekhov’s story looks also like an artist and a professor). We are experiencing delays with deliveries to many countries, but in most cases local services have now resumed. The servant girl is, in Saunders’s view, “a reminder that beauty is an unavoidable, essential part of life; it keeps showing up and we keep responding to it, our theoretical positions notwithstanding, and if we ever stop responding to it, we have become more corpse than person. Well, that’s the question we’ve been asking all along, as we’ve been watching our minds read these Russian stories.

Ours will need to work differently, not only to distinguish them from the older works but so that they will speak to our time as freshly as these Russian stories spoke to theirs. He links each story to a specific aspect of writing and this gives structural reality to his ideas in a way that I've never seen a writing book do before. Turgenev spends the bigger part of it painting with words his numerous characters for them only to meet once in a village pub to enjoy a signing competition.

All this makes Saunders’s book very different from just another “how to” creative writing manual, or just another critical essay.My daughter and I are also both writing (parallel) stories this summer based on our trip to the Southland to complete our having visited all fifty US States!

These stories we've just read were written during an incredible seventy-year artistic renaissance in Russia. He continues that it should be someone with a little hammer standing behind and knocking to remind the happy people about this fact.But it would be better: “Do not squabble” or “Do not bicker” in a sense like the boys do in a school yard. I thought the story was dull unless you are interested in the anthropology and the ways of the entertainment between the Russian lower classes circa mid 19th century.