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Boots!

Where would we be without books?

Where would we be without good?

No, Tender.

It's a rhetorical question, sir, but where would we mean without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt. Welcome to Bookworm. A book I just loved reading,

and a writer that I love to talk to are on. It's George Saunders with his book,

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, Well, the subtitle will tell you at all, in which four Russians

give a master class on writing, reading, and life. Now, these four Russians, why don't you name

them, George? Oh, sure. It's Chekhov, Turgenev, Gogol, and Tolstoy. So we notice right away,

how come No Dostoevsky? Why these four?

Well, the book is based on a class I've been teaching for 20 years at Syracuse.

So Dostoevsky is in that class, as is Isaac Babel and a bunch of other people.

But the goal was to try to set the book up so that I could provide the full text of the

stories that we're going to talk about, try to simulate the classroom.

So the reader reads the story and then we talk about it.

So it became kind of this crazy Rubik's cube of, okay, how long are the stories, how long

are my essays, how many can I fit?

And most importantly, over the years, those 20 years of teaching these stories which are the seven

that kind of teach the best the stories are aren't necessarily my favorites even they're just the

ones that over the years have always you know given the classroom that little pop where they're

...