In [Your Duck Is My Duck ] Deborah Eisenberg speaks in the voice of a despairing god: wry, cool, resonant, capable of three dimensions of irony at once, besotted with the beauty and tragedy of this darkening planet of ours…Eisenberg is a gorgeous writer of lines and dialogue and paragraphs, all the artistry in the marks upon the page, but even more deeplyand much more interestinglyshe is an artist of the unsaid: the unacknowledged silences in a family, the imaginative volta between seemingly disparate images, the barely intimated strangenesses of the world…I thank my stars that there's a writer in the increasingly imperiled world as smart and funny and blazingly moral and devastatingly sidelong as [Eisenberg] is. Great writers show us the corruption at the heart of the world and stand furious witness with us. The comfort they give can be stark, brutal, unflinching, but it is by no means small: It's the comfort of knowing that though we may all be in trouble, we are not here in this mess alone.
The New York Times Book Review - Lauren Groff
Eisenberg is a writer of legendary exactitude, and slowness…She is always worth the wait. The new book is cannily constructed, and so instantly absorbing that it feels like an abduction. The stories themselves are simple and calmly recounted…But the sentences are wild, full of breakneck swerves; leaps in time, space and point of view; all kinds of syntactic fireworks…Each story is spikily distinct, but themes echo and chime. Many of the plots hinge on a death. Character types reappear…On the face of it, Your Duck Is My Duck could be regarded as a politically mild book for Eisenberg. The world intrudes only at the marginstumult is hinted at in unnamed countries, glimpses of unspecified migrants. But these are stories of painful awakenings and refusals of innocence. This book offers no palliatives to its characters or to its readersno plan of action. But it is a compass.
The New York Times - Parul Sehgal
★ 07/23/2018 The six superlative and entertaining stories of Eisenberg’s fifth collection (after 2006’s Twilight of the Superheroes) mostly follow the wayward lives of upper-class Americans whose tragic vanities exaggerate the common human qualities that undermine all types of people. The title story follows a painter who has lost her way and finds it again in the tropical home of a volatile and exploitative wealthy couple. The amazing “Taj Mahal” introduces a cast of aging golden-era film stars who have gathered to debunk, complain about, and revel in the scathing memoir written by the grown son of the director who was once the center of their circle. The debasements and excesses of the Trump era are a frequent inspiration if not a subject—“Merge,” which bears an ironic epigraph from the current president (“I know words. I have the best words.”), is a novella-length mystery about the ne’er-do-well son of a captain of industry, who is guided in an epistolary quest by his weirdo lover. 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. (Sept.)
[Eisenberg] 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
Instead of forcing her characters’ stories into neat, arbitrary, preordained shapes, [Eisenberg] allows them to grow organically into oddly shaped, asymmetrical narratives—narratives that possess all the surprising twists and dismaying turns of real life.” — 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.” — San Francisco Chronicle
“Reading [Eisenberg] makes you wish, as you study the family in front of you in the grocery line, that you could see their thoughts rendered as one of Eisenberg’s stunning inner monologues.” — Los Angeles Times
“...[S]uperlative and entertaining...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)
“[Eisenberg] is always worth the wait...so instantly absorbing that it feels like an abduction...This book offers no palliatives to its characters or to its readers — no plan of action. But it is a compass.” — The New York Times
“Eisenberg is a gorgeous writer...I thank my stars that there’s a writer in the increasingly imperiled world as smart and funny and blazingly moral and devastatingly sidelong as she is.” — New York Times Book Review
“Every character is memorable, every situation seizes our attention, and not a single word is out of place...It’s my fervent hope...that someday we’ll have the opportunity to look back on the many more stories that Deborah Eisenberg has yet to write.” — Financial Times
[Eisenberg] 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.
Every character is memorable, every situation seizes our attention, and not a single word is out of place...It’s my fervent hope...that someday we’ll have the opportunity to look back on the many more stories that Deborah Eisenberg has yet to write.
Reading [Eisenberg] makes you wish, as you study the family in front of you in the grocery line, that you could see their thoughts rendered as one of Eisenberg’s stunning inner monologues.
Eisenberg is a gorgeous writer...I thank my stars that there’s a writer in the increasingly imperiled world as smart and funny and blazingly moral and devastatingly sidelong as she is.
New York Times Book Review
Deborah Eisenberg, one of America’s finest writers, offers new ways of seeing and feeling, as if something were being perfected at the core.
Instead of forcing her characters’ stories into neat, arbitrary, preordained shapes, [Eisenberg] allows them to grow organically into oddly shaped, asymmetrical narratives—narratives that possess all the surprising twists and dismaying turns of real life.
[Eisenberg] is always worth the wait...so instantly absorbing that it feels like an abduction...This book offers no palliatives to its characters or to its readers — no plan of action. But it is a compass.
Deborah Eisenberg, one of America’s finest writers, offers new ways of seeing and feeling, as if something were being perfected at the core.
Reading [Eisenberg] makes you wish, as you study the family in front of you in the grocery line, that you could see their thoughts rendered as one of Eisenberg’s stunning inner monologues.
Every character is memorable, every situation seizes our attention, and not a single word is out of place...It’s my fervent hope...that someday we’ll have the opportunity to look back on the many more stories that Deborah Eisenberg has yet to write.
[Eisenberg] is always worth the wait...so instantly absorbing that it feels like an abduction...This book offers no palliatives to its characters or to its readers — no plan of action. But it is a compass.
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.
Eisenberg’s filament-thin weavings of desire, obligation, and missed opportunities remind one strongly of Henry James. . . . Eisenberg is a master of condensation and reconstruction, making beautiful murals from broken glass.
Comic, elegant, and pitch-perfect.
Eisenberg’s stories possess all the steely beauty of a knife wrapped in velvet.
Eisenberg’s filament-thin weavings of desire, obligation, and missed opportunities remind one strongly of Henry James. . . . Eisenberg is a master of condensation and reconstruction, making beautiful murals from broken glass.
★ 2018-07-02 A vivid mix of stories that pick up and expand on Eisenberg's (The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg, 2010, etc.) signature concerns.Eisenberg is among our most interesting writers of short fiction, author of four previous collections that track the dislocation of her characters in ways both large and small. Of the six pieces in this, her first book in 12 years, five appeared in venues such as the Paris Review and the New York Review of Books; one garnered an O. Henry Award. It's not hard to understand why. Eisenberg's métier is reticence: Her characters move through a world they find bewildering, with no easy strategy to reach out and connect. In the title story, an artist finds herself at the beach home of a rich couple, in a country that could be Mexico. What looks like paradise, however, is an illusion, a landscape on the verge of chaos from overlapping cycles of drought and flooding and the excesses of the expatriate economy. "So naturally," Eisenberg writes, "local people who could leave were leaving, and a lot of the foreigners…who had places in the area were pulling up stakes, too." Place, in other words, exerts a very shallow pull. The same is true of family, which echoes here like a set of lost opportunities, more obligatory than consoling. "Merge" revolves, in part, around the son of a corrupt CEO who liberates himself from his father by forging a $10,000 check. "Cross Off and Move On" looks back at its narrator's three aunts, although, she acknowledges, "They come to mind not so often. They come to mind only as often as does my mother, whose rancor toward them, my father's sisters, imbued them with a certain luster and has linked them to her permanently." Here, we see Eisenberg's approach to narrative, which is to tell us something both incidental and important and then follow it where it goes. The stories here are long, most more than 30 pages, and they take their time in getting to the point. But that's OK; in fact, it's the whole pleasure of reading her, the assurance that there is no quick fix, no easy resolution, that things are as muddy, as complicated on the page as they are in the world. What is never muddy, though, is her writing, which is sharp and pointed and direct. "In our small city," she writes, "where darkness and cold go on and on and most things smell and taste like lint, I groan with longing."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.