A Swim in a Pond in the Rain In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life

DESCRIPTION
For the last twenty years, George Saunders has been teaching a class on the Russian short story to his MFA students at Syracuse University. In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, he shares a version of that class with us, offering some of what he and his students have discovered together over the years. Paired with iconic short stories by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol, the seven essays in this book are intended for anyone interested in how fiction works and why it’s more relevant than ever in these turbulent times.

In his introduction, Saunders writes, “We’re going to enter seven fastidiously constructed scale models of the world, made for a specific purpose that our time maybe doesn’t fully endorse but that these writers accepted implicitly as the aim of art—namely, to ask the big questions, questions like, How are we supposed to be living down here? What were we put here to accomplish? What should we value? What is truth, anyway, and how might we recognize it?” He approaches the stories technically yet accessibly, and through them explains how narrative functions; why we stay immersed in a story and why we resist it; and the bedrock virtues a writer must foster. The process of writing, Saunders reminds us, is a technical craft, but also a way of training oneself to see the world with new openness and curiosity.

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is a deep exploration not just of how great writing works but of how the mind itself works while reading, and of how the reading and writing of stories make genuine connection possible.

AUTHOR
George Saunders is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of ten books, including Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the Man Booker Prize; Congratulations, by the way; Tenth of December, a finalist for the National Book Award; The Braindead Megaphone; and the critically acclaimed short story collections CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, Pastoralia, and In Persuasion Nation. He teaches in the creative writing program at Syracuse University.

DETAILS
Paperback432 pages
Publisher:Random House Publishing Group
Published:April 12, 2022
Subjects:Literary Criticism
Short Stories
Russian & Former Soviet Union
Language Arts & Disciplines
Study & Teaching
EAN:9781984856xxx

Funeral for Flaca by Emily Prado

Description
Literary Nonfiction. Latinx Studies. FUNERAL FOR FLACA is an exploration of things lost and found--love; identity; family--and the traumas that transcend bodies; borders; cultures; and generations. Emilly Prado retraces her experience coming of age as a prep-turned-chola-turned-punk in this collection that is one-part memoir-in-essays; and one-part playlist; zigzagging across genres and decades; much like the rapidly changing and varied tastes of her youth.

Author
Emilly Giselle Prado is a writer and educator living in Portland; Oregon. She is a "first-and-a-half" generation Chicana raised in the San Francisco Bay Area by a first- generation Mexican American and a Mexican immigrant. Emilly spent half a decade working as a freelance multimedia journalist; producing award-winning reporting centered on the voices and experiences of people from historically marginalized communities. She is the author of Examining Assimilation (Enslow; 2019) a youth non-fiction book about the intersections of identity and society. Her writing can be found in NPR; Marie Claire; Bitch Media; Eater; The Oregonian; Ms. Magazine; and more. When not writing; Emilly serves as the Director of Youth Programs at Literary Arts by day and moonlights as DJ Mami Miami with Noche Libre; the Latinx DJ collective she co-founded in 2017.

Paperback: 200 pages
Publisher: Future Tense Books
Date Published: July 1, 2021
Subjects: Literary Criticism Caribbean Latin American Collections Biography Autobiography Cultural Ethnic Regional Hispanic Latino
EAN: 9781892061xxx
Physical Dimensions: 5.00" x 8.00"
Shipping Weight: 1.25 lbs.