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

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

[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.

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.

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.

The most sensuous writer in the land

Absolutely brilliant... I never knew what the phrase "she can write like an angel' meant until I read this babe's book. Because you don't really think of angels writing, do you?You think of them playing harps, and flying about, and grooving en masse on the head of a pin...But there is something other-worldly, something seraphically savage about Helen Simpson's work

Helen Simpson is a writer with such a gift for sweet tenderness that one could almost overlook the glittering sharpness of the insights...[Her stories] are both deeply pleasurable, and-particularly for male readers-deeply uncomfortable.Not many writers manage to be as funny as Helen Simpson without sacrificing the honesty that her writing unmistakably has

Ample proof of her pre-eminent brilliance in the short form…her acute probing of malfunctioning relationships are both provocative and highly entertaining

I found her stories just as hard to put down as I used to; and repeated exposure to them just makes one appreciate the artistry even more… Simpson keeps her eyes open to what is around her, as well as to what is within her characters. It's the kind of detail that makes us wish she would hurry up so that we can read her thoughts about what's going on right now, the precise contours of our present anxieties. I suspect that she will have much to say, and be able to say it very well

A compact insight into the acclaimed writers work

Simpson, to my mind, is one of the best contemporary chroniclers of womanhood that I’ve read. She manages to get under the skin of her characters in a way that makes you feel you know them and completely understand their anxieties, at each point in their lives

She’s a genius at noticing and listening

Unexpected tales, perfectly pitched…suggesting Simpson sprand fully formed when she began writing

The great thing about Helen Simpson – or one of the great things – is that she pins people down so beautifully…her phrases sparkle

Simpson's meticulous fragments of contemporary self-delusion make beautiful narrative shapes out of the ordinary horrors of domestic life