Un efecto íntimo, probablemente diferente para cada uno de nosotros, escritores y lectores, que nos ayuda a ser un poquito mejores después de cada lectura. I've taken several literature courses through the year, but never one just centering on the short story. They were nowhere near as scary as I thought they would be (nor as scary as Miss Crawford’s probing tongue).

Because, in this book, Saunders goes through short stories by the Russian greats, and teaches us the elements of reading, understanding, and writing.I expected a collection of Russian literature stories with some analysis, but instead I received a re-awakening in how to best interpret what I read from now on. The feeling this book evokes is familiarity and calm in a classroom about a subject you are passionate about. It’s been years since I earned my MFA in poetry at Columbia University, and more years than that since I studied literature at the University of Florida. From the very first page to the last I felt like an eager student, learning for the sake of learning. If it’s denied an adequate instrument (and we’re all denied that, at birth, some more than others), out`comes.

We can reduce all of writing to this: we read a line, have a reaction to it, trust (accept) that reaction, and do something in response, instantaneously, by intuition. En total, siete relatos — Chéjov, Tolstói, Turgenev, Gógol — extraordinarios, como no podía ser menos en aquella época dorada del relato breve. In the others, you read the story in its entirety, watching and wondering what element he will pick out for examination.Well, that’s the question we’ve been asking all along, as we’ve been watching our minds read these Russian stories. I was internally screaming and fangirling to find a book that was written by someone like me, for me. It is a form uniquely situated to help us answer the big questions of life: “How are we supposed to be living down here? In my opinion, Gogol stands out with his unique ability to create distinctive voices in his prose and in his anticipation of the 20s century absurdism. But like a novel, it also has some space to breathe, to digress, even if only for a brief moment, to let us mull in the mud of the mundane, in the numbers of the tax man, in the slow time it takes to cut an apple into slices.

We have to deny ourselves the comfort of always being the same person, one who arrived at an answer some time ago and has never had any reason to doubt it. Years ago, on the phone with Bill Buford, then fiction editor of The New Yorker, enduring a series of painful edits, feeling a little insecure, I went fishing for a compliment: "But what do you like about the story? He shows how ambiguous endings keep us wondering, and sometimes have different meanings depending on the translator. It’s just a matter of: (1) noticing ourselves responding to a work of art, moment by moment, and (2) getting better at articulating that response.George Saunders has been teaching a class at Syracuse University about the Russian short story, and this book, this very unique book, is his class. I thought I was only going to be reading a critique of 7 Russian short stories, but there is so much more depth and personality in this book. It allowed for a great range of interpretations and, while mine were not always the same as those by Saunders, I found his approach and angles fascinating. También son relatos “revolucionarios”, aunque no en el sentido de literatura política sino de una cierta resistencia silenciosa contra un sistema represivo y clasista.

Uno pensaría que cualquier lector empedernido, como es mi caso, es, en mayor o menor medida, un aspirante a escritor. That’s a pretty hopeful model of human interaction: two people, mutually respectful, leaning in, one speaking so as to compel, the other listening, willing to be charmed. stories from the Russian masters he and his students discuss throughout the semester, distilling the most important elements in his approach to short story writing.

In helping me to understand the stories, I did not feel I was reading a review of a story written by a critic.