“We might think of a story as a system for the transfer of energy,” he suggests. In Saunders’ suite of metaphors, stories are physical things, dynamical “machines” that perform emotional transformations on the reader. It’s an ambitious reverse-engineering project for which his former career serves him well. His new book, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, reprints seven of the best-three from Chekhov, two from Tolstoy, one each from Gogol and Turgenev-alongside seven lively, edifying essays exploring how and why these stories work. Today, he teaches that creative writing course at Syracuse, and dissects those “simple, clear, elemental” Russian stories in lessons on craft. “What I’d read had struck me (lunkhead that I was) as mild and voiceless and swagger-free.” When a reading of Chekhov’s “Little Trilogy” by his new professor Tobias Wolff moved Saunders to laughter and tears, he changed his mind: “ could feel, channelled through Toby, Chekhov’s humour and tenderness and slightly cynical (loving) heart.” There’s the resemblance: tender, humorous, slightly cynical, and loving-this could be a description of Saunders’s own fiction. “I didn’t know much about Chekhov at that point,” he writes in the companion essay to the story “Gooseberries”.

Saunders believes these older stories represent a “high-water period for the form”, but as a young writer in the ’80s, abandoning a career in geophysical engineering to attend a creative writing MFA at Syracuse University, he’d yet to fall in love with them. Theirs are simple, classically structured, (mostly) realist tales about the frostbitten lives of farmers, peasants, schoolteachers and clerks. His are surreal, irreverent fables set in corporate wastelands and haunted dystopian theme-parks. What do the short stories of the 19th-century Russian masters have in common with the works of George Saunders? At first glance, not a lot.

I swim in a pond in the rain