Sean Hooks in the Los Angeles Review of Books:
George Saunders, now in his early 60s, is a long-standing professor in the MFA Creative Writing program at Syracuse University’s College of Arts & Sciences. Widely recognized as one of the great living practitioners of the short story form, Saunders is a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and a winner of the Booker Prize for his first novel, 2017’s Lincoln in the Bardo. I conducted this interview at the end of 2020 in preparation for the release of his first nonfiction standalone title, A Swim in the Pond in the Rain, an eclectic and engrossing text that condenses the experience of workshopping with a master writer well-versed in instruction and invested in the continued development of his own reading acumen. I emailed George the questions, and he replied with alacrity, composing his answers in what I like to think of as the Nabokovian Strong Opinions mode.
More here. And a review of A Swim in the Pond in the Rain here.