Your Duck Is My Duck: Stories
A much-anticipated collection of brilliantly observant short stories from one of the great American masters of the form, performed by a remarkable cast: Deborah Eisenberg, Julianne Moore, Josh Hamilton, and Wallace Shawn.
At times raucously hilarious, at times charming and delightful, at times as solemn and mysterious as a pond at midnight, Deborah Eisenberg's stories gently compel us to confront the most disturbing truths about ourselves--from our intimate lives as lovers, parents, and children, to our equally troubling roles as citizens on a violent, terrifying planet.
Each of the six stories in Your Duck is My Duck, her first collection since 2006, has the heft and complexity of a novel. With her own inexorable but utterly unpredictable logic and her almost uncanny ability to conjure the strange states of mind and emotion that constitute our daily consciousness, Eisenberg pulls us as if by gossamer threads through her characters--a tormented woman whose face determines her destiny; a group of film actors shocked to read a book about their past; a privileged young man who unexpectedly falls into a love affair with a human rights worker caught up in an all-consuming quest that he doesn't understand.
In Eisenberg's 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.
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Deborah Eisenberg is a MacArthur Foundation Fellow and the recipient of honors including the 2011 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, a Whiting Writer's Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Eisenberg has published four collections of stories: Transactions in a Foreign Currency (1986), Under the 82nd Airborne (1992), All Around Atlantis (1997), and Twilight of the Superheroes (2006). Her first two story collections were republished in one volume as The Stories (So Far) of Deborah Eisenberg (1997). All four volumes were reprinted in 2010 in The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg (2010). She is a professor of writing at Columbia University.
Eisenberg is funny, grim, biting, and wise, but always with a light touch and always in the service of worlds that extend far beyond the page. A virtuoso at rendering the flickering gestures by which people simultaneously hide and reveal themselves, Eisenberg is an undisputed master of the short story.
-- "Publishers Weekly (starred review)"A vivid mix of stories that pick up and expand on Eisenberg's signature concerns...These brilliant stories invoke the desire for something other than what you've been given, which applies to us as much as to Eisenberg's characters, whose distracted desperation can't help, in the end, but reflect our own.
-- "Kirkus Reviews (starred review)"A new collection from MacArthur Fellow Eisenberg, master of the short form. Her characters, whether a politically aware puppeteer or a self-satisfied young man unaccountably in love with a human rights worker, find the earth shifting beneath their feet.
-- "Library Journal"Deborah Eisenberg is the perfect writer for this incredibly imperfect time, inspiring and consoling, because she reminds us in every line of certain saving virtues: wit, wild intelligence, great heart, the beauty of the inquiring human voice. If our culture can produce a writer this wonderful, there must be something beautiful about us yet.
-- "George Saunders, #1 New York Times bestselling author, praise for the author"There aren't many contemporary novels as shudderingly intimate and mordantly funny as Eisenberg's best stories.
-- "New York Times Book Review, praise for the author"Comic, elegant, and pitch-perfect.
-- "Vanity Fair, praise for the author"Eisenberg's stories possess all the steely beauty of a knife wrapped in velvet.
-- "Boston Globe, praise for the author"
