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Writer George Saunders has been teaching creative writing for years, including a course about 19th Century Russian short story writers. Reading this book feels like attending a mini college class with the professor you wish you had as a teacher. Saunders is enthusiastic, warm, and humorous with a conversational tone.

The book consists of the texts of seven short stories, discussions of techniques used by the Russian writers, and an afterthought about how it relates to Saunders' own writing. The seven stories are "In the Cart," "The Darling," and "Gooseberries" by Anton Chekhov; "Master and Man" and "Alyosha the Pot" by Leo Tolstoy; "The Singers" by Ivan Turgenev; and "The Nose" by Nikolai Gogol. Saunders also discusses issues with translation from Russian to English. He shows how ambiguous endings keep us wondering, and sometimes have different meanings depending on the translator. Gogol used lots of plays on words in his writing, but we miss some of his humor because it doesn't come through when the words are translated. My favorite story was Tolstoy's "Master and Man" where characters make repetitive bad choices, and that makes the story work. In several stories Saunders shows how a writer keeps escalating the action to keep the reader's interest. "A Swim in the Pond in the Rain" can be enjoyed by both writers and readers to make their interactions with short stories more meaningful.