Object Lessons: The Paris Review Presents the Art of the Short Story - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1250005981 ISBN 13: 9781250005984

Publisher: Picador, 2012

Synopsis

A New York Magazine Best Book of the Year
A Huffington Post Best Book of the Year
Twenty contemporary authors introduce twenty sterling examples of the short story from the pages of The Paris Review.

What does it take to write a great short story? In Object Lessons, twenty contemporary masters of the genre answer that question, sharing favorite stories from the pages of The Paris Review. Over the course of the last half century, the Review has launched hundreds of careers while publishing some of the most inventive and best-loved stories of our time. 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.

"Some chose classics. Some chose stories that were new even to us. Our hope is that this collection will be useful to young writers, and to others interested in literary technique. Most of all, it is intended for readers who are not (or are no longer) in the habit of reading short stories. We hope these object lessons will remind them how varied the form can be, how vital it remains, and how much pleasure it can give."―from the Editors' Note

WITH SELECTIONS BY
Daniel Alarcón · Donald Barthelme · Ann Beattie · David Bezmozgis · Jorge Luis Borges · Jane Bowles · Ethan Canin · Raymond Carver · Evan S. Connell · Bernard Cooper · Guy Davenport · Lydia Davis · Dave Eggers · Jeffrey Eugenides · Mary Gaitskill · Thomas Glynn · Aleksandar Hemon · Amy Hempel · Mary-Beth Hughes · Denis Johnson · Jonathan Lethem · Sam Lipsyte · Ben Marcus · David Means · Leonard Michaels · Steven Millhauser · Lorrie Moore · Craig Nova · Daniel Orozco · Mary Robison · Norman Rush · James Salter · Mona Simpson · Ali Smith · Wells Tower · Dallas Wiebe · Joy Williams

About this title

About the Author:

Established in 1953, The Paris Review is America's preeminent literary magazine.

Lorin Stein is the editor of The Paris Review.
Sadie Stein is deputy editor of The Paris Review. They are not related.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Daniel Alarcón
on
Joy Williams’s Dimmer
 
 
Joy Williams is one of those unique and instantly recognizable storytelling voices, capable of finding the mysterious and magical heart within even the most ordinary human acts. Her stories begin in unexpected places, and take surprising turns toward their eventual end. She doesn’t describe life; she exposes it. She doesn’t write scenes, she evokes them with a finely observed gesture, casually reinterpreted to provide maximum, often devastating, insight:
He had straddled the baby as it crept across the ground as though little Mal were a gulch he had no intention of falling into.
The baby in this startling image is Mal Vester, the unlucky and unloved protagonist of “Dimmer.” He is a survivor, but there is no romantic luster to his suffering. Mal is rough, untamed, stricken, desperate, and alone. His father, who never wanted him, dies in the first sentence; his mother, the only person who loved him without restraint, dies in the second. Her death haunts this beatiful, moving story, right up until the very last line; but what keeps us reading to the end is the prose, which constantly unpacks and explains Mal’s unlikely world with inventive and striking images. Williams has done something special: she makes Mal’s drifting, his lack of agency, narratively compelling. Life happens to Mal; it is inflicted upon him, a series of misfortunes that culminate in his exile. (A lonelier airport has never appeared in short fiction.) Mal never speaks, but somehow, I didn’t realize it until the third time I’d read “Dimmer.” I knew him so well, felt his tentative joy and fear so intimately, it was as if he’d been whispering in my ear all along.


 
Copyright © 2012 by The Paris Review

About this edition

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1250005981
• ISBN 13: 9781250005984
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 368
• Editor: Lorin Stein, Sadie Stein