Edited by Lorin and Sadie SteinWhat 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 ant...

In this brilliant and sobering self-portrait, Édouard Levé hides nothing from his readers, setting out his entire life, more or less at random, in a string of declarative sentences.Autoportrait is a physical, psychological, sexual, political, and philosophical triumph. Beyond "sincerity," Levé works toward an objectivity so radical it could pass for crudeness, triviality, even banality: the author has stripped himself bare. With the force of a set of maxim...

Penguin presents the audio edition of Who Killed My Father, written and read by Edouard Louis.Who Killed My Father is the story of a tough guy – the story of the little boy I never was. The story of my father.In Who Killed My Father, Édouard Louis explores key moments in his father’s life, and the tenderness and disconnects in their relationship.Told with the fire of a writer determined on social justice, and with the comp...

Fifty of the world’s greatest writers share their views in collaboration with the artist Matteo Pericoli, expanding our own views on place, creativity, and the meaning of homeAll of us, at some point in our daily lives, have found ourselves looking out the window. We pause in our work, tune out of a conversation, and turn toward the outside. Our eyes simply gaze, without seeing, at a landscape whose familiarity becomes the customary ground for distraction: the usual roofto...

Random House presents the audiobook edition of History of Violence by Edouard Louis, read by Joseph Kloska.The radical and urgent new novel from the author of The End of EddyI met Reda on Christmas Eve 2012. I was going home after a meal with friends, at around four in the morning. He approached me in the street, and finally I invited him up to my apartment. He told me the story of his childhood and how his father had ...

______________'Paris may well be White's pearl, but he is in fact the real pearl ... This wonderfully eccentric, conversational and personalised cultural history contains the essence of Edmund White … Entertaining and wry, White is worldly-wise and wise' - Eileen Battersby, Irish Times'Edmund White writing about his Paris years, with walk-on parts for Catherine Deneuve, Yves Saint-Laurent and other assorted members of the F...

Suicide cannot be read as simply another novel—it is, in a sense, the author’s own oblique, public suicide note, a unique meditation on this most extreme of refusals.Presenting itself as an investigation into the suicide of a close friend—perhaps real, perhaps fictional—more than twenty years earlier, Levé gives us, little by little, a striking portrait of a man, with all his talents and flaws, who chose to reject his life, and all the people who loved him...

Gustave Caillebotte was a French Impressionist, though he painted in a more realistic style than many other Impressionists. In common with his precursors Millet and Courbet Caillebotte tried to paint reality as it existed and as he saw it. Perhaps because of his close relationship with so many of his peers, his style and technique varies considerably among his works, as if "borrowing" and experimenting, but not really sticking to any one style. His work may have been strongly in...

In the earliest published diaries of Ned Rorem, the acclaimed American composer recalls a bygone era and its luminaries, celebrates the creative process, and examines the gay culture of Europe and the US during the 1950sOne of America's most significant contemporary composers, Ned Rorem is also widely acclaimed as a diarist of unique insight and refreshing candor. Together, his Paris Diary, first published in 1966, and The New York Diary,which foll...

Short offers the tradition and glorious present of these popular forms that stretch and defy genre. From 1500 to present, hundreds of pieces. Inventive, entertaining, and addictive.Short prose forms are elusive to define--one writer's prose poem is another's flash fiction or brief essay. Rather than quibble, Short opts for inclusiveness. Here is a dazzling array: 100s of pieces (under 1250 words) from 24 Western countries, written over five centur...

'Now I am a mother and a married woman, but not long ago I led a life of crime'So begins Bianca’s tale of growing up the hard way. Orphaned overnight as a teenager, she drops out of school and drifts into the bad company of two criminals her brother brings home. As the four of them plot a fantastical crime, Bianca learns she can drift even lower...Electric and tense with foreboding, A Little Lumpen Novelita - one of the last novellas Roberto Bolaño...

  Toulouse-Lautrec painted quickly, using its neutral tone and conveying action and atmosphere in a few economical strokes. In later years graphic works took precedence and his paintings were often studies for lithographs. In Toulouse-Lautrec’s drawings of dancers and horses, his dancers appear like from a few twists and whirls. He does not draw the dancer, but her movement. He is best known as a storyteller of the nightlife of Paris. Toulouse-Lautrec did not only pict...