The Harvard Advocate

George Saunders is the New York Times bestselling author of ten books, including Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the Man Booker Prize; Congratulations, by the way; Tenth of December, a finalist for the National Book Award; The Braindead Megaphone; and the critically acclaimed short story collections CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, Pastoralia, and In Persuasion Nation. He teaches in the creative writing program at Syracuse University. The first time we asked George Saunders for an interview, he politely declined. At work on his latest book, Saunders had placed himself under “a sort of artistic self-house arrest” because he’d noticed his public persona “depleting his inner life.” Nine months later, fiction editors Juliet Isselbacher and Tadhg Larabee caught up with Saunders to discuss the radical power of empathy, our new shared house arrest, and A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, the book on craft that came out of his original period of self-isolation. The following interview was conducted over email and has been edited for clarity and concision. Let’s start with your new book, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, which comes out on January 12. As I understand it, this work sums up the wisdom you and your students shared during your two decades teaching a class on the Russian short story. Why did you begin teaching this class? What’s distinctive or special about the Russian short story? When I was first hired at Syracuse, I was assigned something called a “forms” course – basically, literature for writers, with an emphasis on craft (“How did they do that?”). I’d taken some time off after my first book, just to read, and had found myself really loving the Russians. So I designed a class to let me read a little deeper in that literature. What I love about the Russians is that they walk right up to the big questions. I’m from the South Side of Chicago, and the first writing that really spoke to me had an overtly moral basis (Ayn Rand, Thoreau, Robert Pirsig). I felt that was the…