“If our culture can produce a writer this wonderful, there must be something beautiful about us yet.”
—George Saunders, author of Lincoln in the Bardo
Each of the six stories that make up this new collection—Deborah Eisenberg’s first for twelve years—has the heft and complexity of a novel. With her own inexorable logic and uncanny ability to conjure up the strange states of mind and emotion that constitute our daily consciousness, Eisenberg pulls us as if by gossamer threads through the lives of her characters. In her world, the forces of money, sex and power cannot be escaped, and the force of history, whether confronted or denied, cannot be evaded. No one writes better about time, tragedy and grief, and the indifferent but beautiful universe around us.
“Shudderingly intimate and mordantly funny.”—New York Times
“The deepest pleasure in Ms Eisenberg’s stories is their vertiginous unpredictability, like obstacle courses the author jumps and rolls and shimmies through, clasping the reader to her like an infant. These are fearless, fierce, light-bearing stories, offered in defense of what still matters.”—New York Observer
“Entering Eisenberg’s fiction is like diving off a cliff into a freezing lake: you are plunged into a world of confusion, with no one to help you get your bearings and no recourse but to struggle your way to the surface. Her openings are trapdoors, pushing the concept of in media res as far as it can go.”—Harper’s
Deborah Eisenberg
Deborah Eisenberg is the author of four previous collections of short stories. She is professor of writing at Columbia University. She lives in New York.