HCSF Reading Group

Join the HCSF Reading Group to discuss "A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life"

In-Person Meeting

San Francisco location will be sent two days before the meeting to those who RSVP. Please note this venue will not be wheelchair accessible.
 

Sunday, April 10
4:30 pm
 

HCSF Members: Free, but RSVP required.
Non-Members: $10

When registering for this event you are confirming that you are fully vaccinated and boosted.
 

Click here to register

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Man Booker Prize-winning novelist ("Lincoln in the Bardo") and Syracuse Creative Writing Professor George Saunders presents seven full-text Russian short stories and intersperses them with his analyses of what makes the stories tick: "In the Cart" (Chekhov), "The Singers" (Turgenev), "The Darling" (Chekhov), "Master and Man" (Tolstoy), "The Nose" (Gogol), "Gooseberries" (Chekhov), and "Alyosha the Pot" (Tolstoy). After 20 years of running writers' workshops, Saunders is adept at explaining how narratives work in direct, accessible language. Why do readers stay immersed in some stories and resist others? Within the short story's frugal form, how do writers respond to readers' natural expectations of efficiency? Must every detail perform story-specific work? As Saunders puts it, "Energy . . .gets made in the early pages and the trick, in the later pages, is to use that energy.”
 

“One of the pleasures of this book is feeling [Saunders’s] own thinking move backwards and forwards, between the writer dissecting [his own] practice and the reader entering in through the spell of the words, to dwell inside the story.” — The Guardian


Meeting Organizer:
Kirsten Miclau
kirstenmiclau@yahoo.com