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George Saunders and the art of keeping the reader reading

newstatesman.com · 2,689 words · saved by 1 readers

In his fascinating new book on Russian short stories, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, Saunders considers how readers experience fiction.

In a Vermont farmhouse, at the end of a hot August day in 1960, John Updike came down from the room where he was working on his second novel, Rabbit, Run . “Well,” he told his wife, Mary, “I’ve just killed the baby.” At the time John and Mary’s third child was three months old, and Updike later admitted he had found writing the scene, in which Rabbit and Janice Angstrom’s daughter drowns in a bathtub, “unsettling”. But obviously, he said, “there was no real baby involved; only a few sentences and adjectives on some pieces of paper”. For the first ten or 15 years of George Saunders’ writing car

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