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.
About the Author :
Deborah Eisenberg is a MacArthur Foundation Fellow and the recipient of honors including the 2011 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, a Whiting Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She 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), and all four volumes were reprinted in The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg (2010). Eisenberg is a professor of writing at Columbia University.
Josh Hamilton was born in New York City, New York. His Broadway credits include Proof, The Cider House Rules, and The Coast of Utopia, and his films include Kicking and Screaming, The House of Yes, Alive, Online, and Outsourced. Josh has narrated several audiobooks, including Lando by Louis L'Amour and Stoner & Spaz by Ron Koertge. He and his wife Lily have one child.
Review :
Eisenberg is funny, grim, biting, and wise, but always with a light touch...Eisenberg is an undisputed master of the short story.
-- "Publishers Weekly (starred review)"
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"
Eisenberg's sparkling stories transport us to a zany, fractious world mirroring the dark shadows of our own.
-- "O, The Oprah Magazine"
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"
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"
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"
