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  • Published: 25 October 2012
  • ISBN: 9781448149957
  • Imprint: Cornerstone Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 368

Object Lessons

The Paris Review Presents the Art of the Short Story



From the pages of The Paris Review: a selection of the greatest short stories of the past sixty years introduced by today's greatest writers

Edited by Lorin and Sadie Stein

What does it take to write a great short story? In Object Lessons, twenty-one contemporary masters of the genre answer that question, sharing favourite stories from the pages of The Paris Review.

A laboratory for new fiction since its founding in 1953, The Paris Review has launched hundreds of careers while publishing some of the most inventive and best-loved stories of the last half century. This anthology – the first of its kind – is more than a treasury: it is an indispensable resource for writers, students and anyone else who wants to understand fiction from a writer's point of view.

A repository of incredible fiction, Object Lessons includes contributions from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Daniel Alarcon, Donald Antrim, Lydia Davis, Dave Eggers, Mary Gaitskill, Aleksandar Hemon, Jonathan Lethem, Sam Lipsyte, Ben Marcus, Colum McCann, Lorrie Moore, Norman Rush, Mona Simpson and Ali Smith, among others.

  • Published: 25 October 2012
  • ISBN: 9781448149957
  • Imprint: Cornerstone Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 368

Praise for Object Lessons

The Paris Review is one of the few truly essential literary magazines of the twentieth century – and now of the twenty-first.

Margaret Atwood

Aspiring writers should read the entire canon of literature that precedes them, back to the Greeks, up to the current issue of The Paris Review

William Kennedy

[A]lways fascinating… Short stories are a vital training ground for new novelists and a chance for established ones to experiment. Our literary culture would be so much poorer without them.

Telegraph

This eye-bleedingly handsome hardback collects some of the very best of the best, as 20 contemporary writers rummage around in the Review’s hallowed annals and select and introduce one favourite story each…The masterclass act is a simple format but works wonders, making this handsome brown brick really as important and valuable as it feels. If you care about short stories this thing has about a degree’s worth of lessons in it. It’s the hot highbrow present for Christmas 2012.

Dazed & Confused

Object Lessons is a pocket sized masterclass for aspiring writers… [the introductions] send the reader back to the chosen story with fresh eyes. Some pinpoint significant details easily overlooked… Others find a way of summing up a story’s entire impact.

George Hull, Times Literary Supplement

The Paris Review is one of the few truly essential literary magazines of the twentieth century – and now of the twenty-first.

Margaret Atwood