Here was a line that wowed me from the first story in the book, “In the Cart” by Anton Chekhov: “‘And you can’t understand,’ she thought, ‘why God gives good looks, friendliness, charming, melancholy eyes to weak, unhappy, useless people––why are they so attractive.'”Įven though all the words in the sentence are simple, it expresses something complex about this character’s inner life and the life of the character she’s thinking about. What keeps a reader reading? Tender vulnerability, a surprising turn of phrase, a description that changes the way we view an ordinary object, a bit of dialogue that makes us feel tethered to the characters. Wow Your Reader Once Sentence at a Timeīill Buford, a former fiction editor of the New Yorker, once said that what he liked about a story was “I read a line. He explores seven stories by nineteenth-century masters and looks for lessons that these stories still have for writers today. The book is based on a course he teaches at the University of Syracuse about the Russian short story. Instead we see a different side of Saunders, his teacher side. In George Saunders’s latest book, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, we don’t see the zany satire he’s known for.
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