Initially, we share Gen’s eye-rolling response to Brenda’s banalities. Take “A Thing at Work”, which features glamorous office worker Gen, her garrulous underling Brenda and their insecure boss Tim. Or at least he does up to a point – because, especially in the stories set in his contemporary America, he can’t always hide his sympathy for people at the bottom of the social heap, or his distaste for those who feel themselves entitled. Nonetheless, in his new nine-story collection Saunders sticks to his guns as he matches practice to theory. In an age of culture wars, when open-mindedness comes a poor second to the recitation of unexamined certainties from all sides, such ambiguity is distinctly unfashionable. Instead, by constantly shifting perspective, they invite us to consider – and constantly reconsider – the different ways in which the same events and characters can legitimately be regarded. What should we value?” One thing they don’t do, however, is answer them. namely to ask the big questions: How are we supposed to be living down here?.

According to Saunders, the best stories are “scale models of the world, made for a specific purpose. These claims, it’s fair to say, weren’t modest.

A Swim in the Pond in the Rain combined close analysis of seven tales by Russian masters such as Tolstoy, Chekhov and Gogol with wider claims for what the short story can achieve. Last year, George Saunders – routinely hailed as the world’s best short story writer, as well as a Booker prizewinner with his only novel Lincoln in the Bardo – published his first full-length work of non-fiction.

George saunders a swim in the pond