Saunders guides us, as if we were sitting in his classroom, through works by Anton Chekhov, Ivan Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy and Nikolai Gogol. ( Bardo is his only proper novel.) His latest work, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, is a different sort of book entirely: a collection of seven classic Russian short stories, reproduced here in full and paired with Saunders’s own commentaries on the stories and the writer’s craft. Saunders teaches creative writing at Syracuse and is known primarily for his short stories. Like much of Saunders’s fiction, Bardo uses an idiosyncratic premise to say something disarmingly life-affirming. The novel’s depiction of a president in anguish-both for his son and for his warring nation-is touchingly humane, as is the narration by the novel’s two ghostly protagonists (one of whom has a “tremendous member” and died before he could consummate his marriage) who linger in the cemetery. Bardo finds a grieving Abraham Lincoln, in February 1862, roaming the graveyard at night in the wake of his son Willie’s death. When last we met George Saunders, we were set down in Washington D.C.’s Oak Hill Cemetery, the site of his Booker Prize-winning novel Lincoln in the Bardo, published in 2017.
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