There’s a popular T-shirt just now sporting the meme “Great story, Bro. Tell it again.” It’s a snarky, preemptive retort to those conjoined contemporary menaces: self-absorption and overshare. We’ve all stood next to that guy with the interminable account, gritting our teeth as we wait for the laggard coda. The shirt’s a bestseller because people know just what it means.
Yet taken at face value the sentiment is joyous. What could be better than hearing a story so wonderful, so transporting and affecting, that you wish immediately to hear it again? I like to imagine the editors and writers who put together Object Lessons all wearing these T-shirts at some subtly decadent publication party—and wearing them earnestly.
–from a review of Object Lessons: The Paris Review Presents the Art of the Short Story
