The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg

“One of America’s finest writers.”—San Francisco Chronicle    “Concentrated bursts of perfection.”—The Times (London)    “Shimmering stories that possess the power and charm to move us.” —The New York Times    “Exhilarating.”—Harper’s Magazine    “Outstanding.”—Christian Science Monitor    “Eisenberg simply writes like no one else.”—Elle    “Eisenberg’s stories possess all the steely beauty of a knife wrapped in velvet.”—The Boston Globe    “Dazzling.”—Time Out New York    “Magic.”—Newsweek    “Comic, elegant and pitch perfect.”—Vanity Fair    “One of the great fiction writers living in America today.”—The Dallas Morning News    “There aren’t many contemporary novels as shudderingly intimate and mordantly funny as Eisenberg’s best stories.”—The New York Times Book Review Since 1986 with the publication of her first story collection, Deborah Eisenberg has devoted herself to writing “exquisitely distilled stories” which “present an unusually distinctive portrait of contemporary American life” to quote the MacArthur Foundation. This one volume brings together Transactions in a Foreign Currency (1986), Under the 82nd Airborne (1992), All Around Atlantis (1997) and her most recent collection-Twilight of the Superheroes (2006). Deborah Eisenberg is the author of four collections of stories. She is the recipient of a MacArthur Genius Grant, a Whiting Writers’ Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She has taught at the University of Virginia since 1994, where she is currently a professor of creative writing. Since 1986, with the publication of her first story collection, Deborah Eisenberg has devoted herself to writing “exquisitely distilled stories” which “present an unusually distinctive portrait of contemporary American life” to quote the MacArthur Foundation. This one volume brings together Transactions in a Foreign Currency, Under the 82nd Airborne, All Around Atlantis and her most recent collection, Twilight of the Superheroes. “Deborah Eisenberg writes with a playwright's quick, bristling ear for dialogue and a painter's affection for nuance and image … Miss Eisenberg has found words to capture all the fleeting, ambivalent emotions of daily experience . . . and she's turned those elusive feelings into shimmering stories that possess the power to charm and to move us.”—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times “Deborah Eisenberg writes with a playwright's quick, bristling ear for dialogue and a painter's affection for nuance and image … Miss Eisenberg has found words to capture all the fleeting, ambivalent emotions of daily experience . . . and she's turned those elusive feelings into shimmering stories that possess the power to charm and to move us.”—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times”This collection contains in their entirety the four books of stories Eisenberg has written over a 20-year span … The resulting book weighs in at just under a thousand pages: heavy lifting but not heavy reading. Although the stories explore different geographies and different lives, there is more consistency throughout than variety. Those who admire some portion of Eisenberg's writing will find the same pleasures in the whole: remarkable language, unconventional story­telling and her characters' well-­rendered and profound unease at inhabiting an uneasy world … Eisenberg conveys their interiority in such a fine grain that one thinks of Virginia Woolf, if only Woolf's work were leavened with startling humor.”—Jean Thompson, The New York Times "Deborah Eisenberg, one of America's finest writers, offers new ways of seeing and feeling, as if something were being perfected at the core … Light-years ahead of most story writers.”—San Francisco Chronicle "Eisenberg is a master of condensation and reconstruction, making beautiful murals from broken glass.”—O, The Oprah Magazine "Readers who have enjoyed Eisenberg's four volumes of short stories or grown familiar with her work in The New Yorker over the past 20 years will be thrilled with this substantial collection, which demonstrates the full range of her talents. These satisfyingly lengthy stories also have the potential to engross readers who avoid the genre, having been left hanging one too many times with lazy, enigmatic endings. Eisenberg is equally at home with artsy Manhattan social comedy (see 'Flotsam,' from Transactions in a Foreign Currency and 'Some Other, Better Otto,' from Twilight of the Superheroes), Jamesian narratives that characterize complex relationships in gracefully balanced long sentences (see 'A Cautionary Tale,' from Under the 82nd Airborne), politically savvy stories that capture differences of race and class through the perspective of American transplants in countries like Honduras (see 'Broken Glass,' Transactions, and 'Someone To Talk To,' from All Around Atlantis), and clear-eyed stories that nevertheless reveal the disjointed perceptions of characters with tragically damaged psyches (see 'Window,' Twilight) … This impressive volume celebrates the prodigious talent of a writer who deserves to be better known.”—Sue Russell, Library Journal Praise for Deborah Eisenberg:“Shimmering stories that possess the power and charm to move us.”—The New York Times“There aren’t many contemporary novels as shudderingly intimate and mordantly funny as Eisenberg’s best stories.”—The New York Times Book Review“One of America’s finest writers.”—San Francisco Chronicle“Eisenberg’s stories possess all the steely beauty of a knife wrapped in velvet.”—The Boston Globe“Concentrated bursts of perfection.”—The Times (London)“Comic, elegant and pitch perfect.”—Vanity Fair“One of the great fiction writers living in America today.”—The Dallas Morning NewsTABLE OF CONTENTS TRANSACTIONS IN A FOREIGN CURRENCYFlotsamWhat It Was Like, Seeing ChrisRafe's CoatA Lesson in Traveling LightDaysTransactions in a Foreign CurrencyBroken Glass UNDER THE 82ND AIRBORNEA Cautionary TaleUnder the 82nd AirborneThe RobberyPresentsThe CustodianHoly WeekIn the Station ALL AROUND ATLANTISThe Girl Who Left Her Sock on the FloorAcross the LakeSomeone to Talk ToTlaloc's ParadiseRosie Gets a SoulMermaidsAll Around Atlantis TWILIGHT OF THE SUPERHEROESTwlight of the SuperheroesSome Other, Better OttoLike It or NotWindowRevenge of the DinosaursThe Flaw in the Deisgn