Author of the week

George Saunders

Few writers understand the mechanics of the short story better than George Saunders, said Connor Goodwin in The Wall Street Journal. “A gentle giant of American letters,” the 62-year-old has been teaching creative writing at Syracuse University since shortly after his debut collection, 1996’s CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, won wide acclaim. His unique perspective on storycraft springs in part from his background in engineering, which trained him to value ruthless efficiency in pursuit of any goal, including the goal of grabbing and holding a reader’s interest. In his new book, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, which grew out of a class he teaches, he deconstructs stories by Tolstoy, Chekhov, and other Russian masters, using plenty of chatty language alongside orderly charts and tables that illuminate the authors’ methods.

The book isn’t for technicalminded writers only, said Killian Fox in TheGuardian .com. Saunders champions Russian fiction because the stories all have a moralethical core. “They’re all pretty much about: Will this guy live? Did this person do right or wrong?” he says. “I understood pretty early that’s what writing was for: to help you live a better life, to have a moral relation with life.” Though he knows his ideas could be called old-fashioned, he argues fiction trains us to connect with a wider range of other minds and also to not fully trust emotion-driven first impressions. A story, he says, is “like a laboratory to help you identify your own habits and projections,” whereas social media platforms encourage hot takes that amplify biases. “The deeper parts of our brain,” he says, “are actually more empathic.”