It’s been years since I’ve dived into the Russian greats. The short stories of Tolstoy, Chekov, Turgenev, and others serve as perfect imitations of our world in all their complexity and ambiguity. Each one richly imagined, as distinct from one another as each man or woman is from the next. How could the experience of reading them be enhanced, then, if these stories that were written one hundred and fifty years earlier remain as paragons of what literature can achieve? Enter Saunders. Here, he’s collected seven of these timeless Russian short stories. Afterwards, he presents an account of his own thoughts - how one can think of the structures of plot, turns in character, choices of setting. Having taught these authors for the past twenty years, his humble insights into how these stories work and what they mean give the reader a seat in his class. His thoughts are generous, down to earth. Simultaneously, they give one an understanding of just how daunting a task it is to produce a story such as these. Hell, it shows how difficult it is to produce one even worth reading. Books on writing are a dime a dozen. They mostly echo the same tired truisms: Show don’t tell, shitty first drafts, the hero’s journey, etc. etc. None that I have read have struck the chord that Saunders has managed in this collection.