The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg
Eisenberg, like Alice Munro and Amy Hempl, is a short story specialist who infuses the concentrated form with emotional intricacy and depth, dark humor, suspense, and wonder. Fluent in the dreams, pretensions, and demands of New York City, Eisenberg writes with equal finesse about those who have succeeded in securing a place in the social order and floundering twentysomethings botching love and other opportunities. Eisenberg also knows how a small apartment can become a wilderness and how dangerous the isolation of a rural life can be. Her characters, especially betrayed women, curl themselves around their psychic wounds like hands cupped around a candle’s flame as the world churns on, assured, impatient, devouring. A MacArthur fellowship is Eisenberg’s most recent major award, and now readers are granted a boon: this glorious volume contains in their entirety Transactions in a Foreign Currency (1986), Under the 82nd Airborne (1992), All around Atlantis (1997), and Eisenberg’s most commanding collection, Twilight of the Superheroes (2006). An electrifying gathering of masterful tales of treachery and resilience, souls lost and found. --Donna Seaman