back
1 comments
Last paragraph:

> Yet we can turn to these greats to recover the “aim of art”—which is to “ask the big questions,” such as “how are we supposed to be living down here?” Although I cannot assent to a number of Saunders’s answers to that question, I am grateful for his reminder of the goal of art. In an era diseased by “facile, shallow, agenda-laced” information (“as you may have noticed,” Saunders says, tongue-in-cheek), A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is especially welcome.

The book is a literary analysis of seven stories from four Russian masters to examine story-craft.