Novelist as a Vocation

Robert Allen Papinchak, a former university English professor, is a freelance book critic. He has reviewed a range of fiction in newspapers, magazines, journals, and online including in The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, The Seattle Times, USA Today, People, The Writer, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, The National Book Review, the New York Journal of Books, the Washington Independent Review of Books, World Literature Today, Strand Magazine, Mystery Scene Magazine, Suspense Magazine, and others. He taught a Scene of the Crime course in London and was the mystery reviewer for Canadian journals. He has been a judge for Publishers Weekly’s BookLife Creative Writing Contest and the Nelson Algren Literary Prize for the Short Story. His own fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and received a STORY award. He is the author of Sherwood Anderson: A Study of the Short Fiction.

Robert Allen Papinchak

An Unnatural Spring: On Haruki Murakami’s “Novelist as a Vocation”

"There is nothing more poetic and terrible than the skyscrapers' battle with the heavens that cover them." — Federico García Lorca

Nonfiction

Rock Me on the Water: 1974 — The Year Los Angeles Transformed Movies, Music, Television and Politics

Those Were the Days

"Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history." — George Bernard Shaw

History

Saunders has taught in the prestigious Syracuse University MFA program in creative writing for over twenty years, and for most of those years, has taught a class where he and his students have dissected classic short stories to “see what they can steal” and to understand the physics of the form. In this new book, the New York Times bestselling, Booker Prize-winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo and Tenth of December welcomes all of us — readers, writers, readers who want to be writers, writers who know they need to be better readers to be better writers — into his classroom.

Paired with some of Saunders’ favorite stories by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol, these brand-new, wholly original essays are intended for anyone interested in how fiction works and why fiction is more relevant than ever in these turbulent times.

Saunders approaches each of these stories technically yet accessibly, and through them explains how narrative functions; why we stay immersed in a story and why we resist it; and the bedrock virtues a writer must foster. A SWIM IN A POND IN THE RAIN allows the reader to soak up great writing, but even more so, it teaches the reader to recognize the feelings a story evokes, and then deconstructs the techniques that conjured those feelings.
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A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

How to Read an Artichoke: On George Saunders’s “A Swim in a Pond in the Rain”

"For a long time now I haven't been I."
— Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

Around the World

"Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't." — Mark Twain

Fiction

"Writing only leads to more writing." — Colette

Literary Criticism

"The older one grows, the more one likes indecency." — Virginia Woolf

Memoir &amp; Essay

Rabbits for Food

Mental Trauma: On Binnie Kirshenbaum’s “Rabbits for Food”

Forever and a Day

Long Live 007

"The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter, eh?" — Dashiell Hammett

Noir

The So Blue Marble

Menace and Malice: On Dorothy B. Hughes’s Debut, “The So Blue Marble”

Cross Her Heart

Avenues of Terror

The Melody

Elegies and Enduring Love in Jim Crace’s “The Melody”

Noir Turned on Its Side

"The function of science fiction is not always to predict the future but sometimes to prevent it." — Frank Herbert

Last Stories

Love’s Languishing in the “Last Stories” of William Trevor

Robert Allen Papinchak, a former university English professor, is a freelance book critic. He has reviewed a range of fiction in newspapers, magazines, journals, and online including in The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, The Seattle Times, USA Today, People, The Writer, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, The National Book Review, the New York Journal of Books, the Washington Independent Review of Books, World Literature Today, Strand Magazine, Mystery Scene Magazine, Suspense Magazine, and others. He taught a Scene of the Crime course in London and was the mystery reviewer for Canadian journals. He has been a judge for Publishers Weekly’s BookLife Creative Writing Contest and the Nelson Algren Literary Prize for the Short Story. His own fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and received a STORY award. He is the author of Sherwood Anderson: A Study of the Short Fiction.

Robert Allen Papinchak

Articles