NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the Booker Prize–winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo and Tenth of December comes a literary master class on what makes great stories work and what they can tell us about ourselves—and our world today. LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/DIAMONSTEIN-SPIELVOGEL AWARD • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, NPR, Time, San Francisco Chronicle, Esquire , Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Town & Country, The Rumpus, Electric Lit, Thrillist, BookPage • “[A] worship song to writers and readers.”— Oprah Daily For the last twenty years, George Saunders has been teaching a class on the Russian short story to his MFA students at Syracuse University. In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain , he shares a version of that class with us, offering some of what he and his students have discovered together over the years. Paired with iconic short stories by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol, the seven essays in this book are intended for anyone interested in how fiction works and why it’s more relevant than ever in these turbulent times. In his introduction, Saunders writes, “We’re going to enter seven fastidiously constructed scale models of the world, made for a specific purpose that our time maybe doesn’t fully endorse but that these writers accepted implicitly as the aim of art—namely, to ask the big questions, questions like, How are we supposed to be living down here? What were we put here to accomplish? What should we value? What is truth, anyway, and how might we recognize it?” He approaches the stories technically yet accessibly, and through them explains how narrative functions; why we stay immersed in a story and why we resist it; and the bedrock virtues a writer must foster. The process of writing, Saunders reminds us, is a technical craft, but also a way of training oneself to see the world with new openness and curiosity. A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is a deep exploration not just of how great writing works but of how the mind itself works while reading, and of how the reading and writing of stories make genuine connection possible.

Recommended on 2 episodes:

A $1.7 Million Toilet and Liberalism's Failure to Build

There is so much we need to build right now. The housing crunch has spread across the country; by one estimate, we’re a few million units short. And we also need a huge build-out of renewable energy infrastructure — at a scale some experts compare to the construction of the Interstate highway system. And yet, we’re not seeing anything close to the level of building that we need — even in the blue states and cities where housing tends to be more expensive and where politicians and voters purport to care about climate change and affordable housing. Jerusalem Demsas is a staff writer at The Atlantic who obsesses over these questions as much as I do. In this conversation, she takes me through some of her reporting on local disputes that block or hinder projects, and what they say about the issues plaguing development in the country at large. We discuss how well-intentioned policies evolved into a Kafka-esque system of legal and bureaucratic hoops and delays; how clashes over development reveal a generational split in the environmental movement; and what it would take to cut decades of red tape.

Books recommended:

• 📕  Don't Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party (Politics and Society in Modern America) by Lily Geismer
• 📘  The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism (Studies in Environment and History) by Adam Rome
• 📗  A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life by George Saunders

Jerusalem Demsas April 16, 2024 3 books recommended

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The Teen Mental Health Crisis, Part 2

The data is clear: Levels of anxiety, depression, self-harm and suicide have spiked for American teenagers over the last decade. Last Friday’s episode with the psychologist Jean Twenge sifted through that data to uncover both the scale of the crisis and its possible causes. Today’s episode focuses on the experiences behind that data: the individuals who are struggling, and what we can do as friends, parents and a broader society to help them. Lisa Damour is a clinical psychologist, the co-host of the podcast “Ask Lisa” and the author of books including “The Emotional Lives of Teenagers: Raising Connected, Capable and Compassionate Adolescents” and “Under Pressure: Confronting the Epidemic of Stress and Anxiety in Girls.” Statistics about teenage mental health are illuminating, but Damour has spent decades working closely with teens, allowing her to fill in some of the gaps in that data and give a nuanced picture of what may be going on. She has emerged from her clinical experience more hopeful about the prospects for helping teens through a life stage — and a moment in history — that poses serious challenges to their well-being. We discuss the neuroscience behind why being a teenager is so emotionally difficult, why Damour doesn’t believe smartphones are primarily to blame for the teen mental health crisis, how overscheduling teens can hurt their social development, why girls experience more anxiety than boys even as they outperform boys in school, which types of smartphone use can be good and bad for young people, the problems with the cultural belief that stress and anxiety should be eliminated at all costs, how to tell the difference between harmful and healthy anxiety, how parents should approach social media use with their children, how all of us can help one another cope with negative emotions and more.

Books recommended:

• 📙  A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life by George Saunders
• 📕  Psychoanalytic Diagnosis: Understanding Personality Structure in the Clinical Process by Nancy McWilliams
• 📘  Transcendent Kingdom: A novel by Yaa Gyasi

Lisa Damour May 23, 2023 3 books recommended

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