A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

Saunders teaches a course on Russian short fiction at Syracuse, and this book is essentially that course — Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Gogol — with his commentary woven through. It is the best book about how fiction works that I have ever read. You don’t need to be a writer to love it; you just need to care about why certain sentences stop you cold and others slide past without leaving a mark.

Each story is reprinted in full, then Saunders walks you through it with the patience and precision of someone who has read it a hundred times and still finds new things. By the end, you will read differently. That’s not a small thing.