In recent decades, too many academic literary critics have used classic works of literature as mere springboards for social or political theories. When they do turn their attention to a work, they ...

George Saunders, a creative writing professor at Syracuse University for more than two decades, has written an accessible version of his course on the Russian short-story masters of the 19th century: ...

It all sounds a bit folksy, reductive, technocratic. Engineers, though, may design small but think big. The best stories, such as the seven gems Saunders dismantles and rebuilds here, deliver “scale ...