Along the way, she laments her dead-end teaching career admires a handsome man-an alcoholic school examiner-who they encounter on the road and stops at a teahouse full of abrasive drunks. The plot of “In the Cart” is simple enough: Marya Vasilyevna, a schoolteacher who remembers little of her family and early life, travels with her driver on a muddy road back to her home village. To start, Saunders takes a “page at a time” approach, following each page of Chekhov’s text with a strand of his own explanation. The first piece here is Chekhov’s “In the Cart,” published in 1897. “I offer the English translations,” he writes by way of introduction, “that I’ve responded to most strongly or, in some cases, the versions I first found years ago and have been teaching from since.” More to the point: “If my goal was to get a non-reader to fall in love with the short story, these are among the stories I’d offer her.” Saunders guides us, as if we were sitting in his classroom, through works by Anton Chekhov, Ivan Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy and Nikolai Gogol. ( Bardo is his only proper novel.) His latest work, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, is a different sort of book entirely: a collection of seven classic Russian short stories, reproduced here in full and paired with Saunders’s own commentaries on the stories and the writer’s craft. Saunders teaches creative writing at Syracuse and is known primarily for his short stories. Like much of Saunders’s fiction, Bardo uses an idiosyncratic premise to say something disarmingly life-affirming. The novel’s depiction of a president in anguish-both for his son and for his warring nation-is touchingly humane, as is the narration by the novel’s two ghostly protagonists (one of whom has a “tremendous member” and died before he could consummate his marriage) who linger in the cemetery. Bardo finds a grieving Abraham Lincoln, in February 1862, roaming the graveyard at night in the wake of his son Willie’s death. When last we met George Saunders, we were set down in Washington D.C.’s Oak Hill Cemetery, the site of his Booker Prize-winning novel Lincoln in the Bardo, published in 2017.

I swim in a pond in the rain