" This idea of a story as an ongoing communication between minds arises naturally from the activity of one person telling a story to another. This model applies to these Russian stories we're reading, and would have applied the first time some cavepeople gathered around a fire for the first literary reading, and if that early storyteller ignored this notion of story as ongoing communication between performer and audience, he would have found, as today, that some of his audience was dozing off or sneaking out of the cave early, in that crouching posture people adopt when sneaking out of a literary event, as if crouching like that will make them invisible to the author, which believe me, it doesn't. "

― George Saunders , A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life