"One of the great writers of the nineteenth century, Nikolai Gogol was born and raised in Ukraine before he was lionized and canonized in Russia. The ambiguities within his subversive, ironic works are matched by those which surround the debate over his national identity. This b…
"The Guide focuses on Gogol's language in "The Nose" and his playful twisting of the many Russian idioms that are usually lost in English translations of the story. It traces Gogol's descriptions of St. Petersburg everyday life, familiar to the writer's contemporaries but hidden…
In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, George Saunders guides the reader through seven classic Russian short stories he's been teaching for twenty years as a professor in the prestigious Syracuse University graduate MFA creative writing program. Paired with stories by Chekhov, Turgene…
From the New York Times bestselling 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. For the last twenty years, George Saunder…