To his legions of readers, Gene Logsdon is best known as the Contrary Farmer. This is Logsdon's ode to the watery microcosms all around, from the half-acre farm pond to the suburban garden pool. Readers looking for hands-on experience will find plenty of pond-keeping do's and don'ts.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the Booker Prize–winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo and Tenth of December comes a literary master class on what makes great stories work and what they can tell us about ourselves—and our world today. LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/DIAMONSTEIN-SPIELVOGEL AWARD • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, NPR, Time, San Francisco Chronicle, Esquire, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Town & Country, The Rumpus, Electric Lit, Thrillist, BookPage • “[A] worship song to writers and readers.”—Oprah Daily For the last twenty years, George Saunders has been teaching a class on the Russian short story to his MFA students at Syracuse University. In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, he shares a version of that class with us, offering some of what he and his students have discovered together over the years. Paired with iconic short stories by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol, the seven essays in this book are intended for anyone interested in how fiction works and why it’s more relevant than ever in these turbulent times. In his introduction, Saunders writes, “We’re going to enter seven fastidiously constructed scale models of the world, made for a specific purpose that our time maybe doesn’t fully endorse but that these writers accepted implicitly as the aim of art—namely, to ask the big questions, questions like, How are we supposed to be living down here? What were we put here to accomplish? What should we value? What is truth, anyway, and how might we recognize it?” He approaches the stories technically yet accessibly, and through them explains how narrative functions; why we stay immersed in a story and why we resist it; and the bedrock virtues a writer must foster. The process of writing, Saunders reminds us, is a technical craft, but also a way of training oneself to see the world with new openness and curiosity. A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is a deep exploration not just of how great writing works but of how the mind itself works while reading, and of how the reading and writing of stories make genuine connection possible.

In this gorgeous companion to the acclaimed Over and Under the Snow and Up in the Garden and Down in the Dirt, Kate Messner and Christopher Silas Neal bring to life a secret underwater world. In this book, readers will discover the plants and animals that make up the rich, interconnected ecosystem of a mountain pond. Over the pond, the water is a mirror, reflecting the sky. But under the pond is a hidden world of minnows darting, beavers diving, tadpoles growing. These and many other secrets are waiting to be discovered...over and under the pond.

“A sharp, funny, and eccentric debut … Pond makes the case for Bennett as an innovative writer of real talent. … [It]reminds us that small things have great depths.”–New York Times Book Review "Dazzling…exquisitely written and daring ." –O, the Oprah Magazine Immediately upon its publication in Ireland, Claire-Louise Bennett’s debut began to attract attention well beyond the expectations of the tiny Irish press that published it. A deceptively slender volume, it captures with utterly mesmerizing virtuosity the interior reality of its unnamed protagonist, a young woman living a singular and mostly solitary existence on the outskirts of a small coastal village. Sidestepping the usual conventions of narrative, it focuses on the details of her daily experience—from the best way to eat porridge or bananas to an encounter with cows—rendered sometimes in story-length, story-like stretches of narrative, sometimes in fragments no longer than a page, but always suffused with the hypersaturated, almost synesthetic intensity of the physical world that we remember from childhood. The effect is of character refracted and ventriloquized by environment, catching as it bounces her longings, frustrations, and disappointments—the ending of an affair, or the ambivalent beginning with a new lover. As the narrator’s persona emerges in all its eccentricity, sometimes painfully and often hilariously, we cannot help but see mirrored there our own fraught desires and limitations, and our own fugitive desire, despite everything, to be known. Shimmering and unusual, Pond demands to be devoured in a single sitting that will linger long after the last page.

A collection of poems that provide a look at some of the animals, insects, and plants that are found in ponds, with accompanying information about each.

About the Book The instant attraction and love that Matthew Baldwin and Chloe Singh feel for each other during their first in-person meeting at the beginning of From Across the Pond fuels the rapid development of their relationship. The couple’s past romantic relationships with their friend Kelly Bonner, along with other temptations, add wrinkles and drama to their story. As all of these relationships develop, evolve, and become interconnected, they rub against the grain of societal and family norms, which creates drama and some suspense in the novel. It is hopeful that readers will be able to see folks of different skin colors and ethnicities, folks in the LGBTQ community, and folks in interracial relationships in a more favorable and positive light. It’s time to let go of the fear that breeds the mistrust and hate and to embrace one another as equal members of the human race. It’s time to recognize that regardless of skin color, ethnicity, religious affiliation, and sexual orientation, no matter how big or small the contribution, everyone has something positive to offer to society and civilization. About the Author Despite having been declared legally blind for the past twenty years, Michael T. Bellinger has a Bachelor’s degree in Accounting and a Master’s in Education. He has worked in public accounting as a CPA and in a parochial school as a volunteer classroom teacher, where he taught computers and technology to the K-thru-8 students. Michael enjoys listening to music and audiobooks, and his tastes in both are eclectic. He enjoys writing poetry when the inspiration hits him, and he is currently working on Book Five of the six-book series of From Across the Pond. Michael and his wife, Lisa, have been married for 31 years, and together they share two grown sons. They live in a small town in NJ.