Your Duck Is My Duck

Description

Each of the six stories that make up this new collection - 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.

Deborah Eisenberg is the author of four previous collections of short stories. She is professor of writing at Columbia University.

"If our culture can produce a writer this wonderful, there must be something beautiful about us yet." -- George Saunders "Eisenberg doesn't need dystopias: she's perfectly capable of summoning apocalyptic atmospheres by focusing her extraordinary talents on the world right outside the window." -- Chris Power * The Guardian * "Her descriptions and one-liners are highly quotable, with a knockabout wisdom and an underlying melancholy; the effect can be haunting as well as funny." * The Sunday Times * "These stories take their time, draw us in to their claustrophobic little worlds, and savour language and humanity, in all their muddled, inadequate glory." * The Spectator * "[A] scintillating showcase." -- Anthony Cummins * The Observer * "Deborah Eisenberg's first book in twelve years is filled with prose so intense it manages to paint a comprehensive picture of our times in six short stories." -- Anna Aslanyan * The TLS * "The characters in Deborah Eisenberg's complex, compelling, subtle short stories inhabit a disintegrating world." -- Eithne Farry * The Daily Mail * "Reading Deborah Eisenberg's latest collection of stories, Your Duck Is My Duck, was for me like going to a party hoping to get away as quickly as politeness allowed and at 4am finding myself still engrossed in conversation with the most delightfully absorbing new acquaintance - which is an elaborate way of saying that I loved these stories." "There is no sure footing in Eisenberg's world, but it is one that is always bracing and never dull. In its clear-sightedness, her writing feels like a palliative against the catastrophes that beset us and which it elegantly mocks and subtly defies." -- Sallye Vickers * The Literary Review * "Ducks are having a literary moment." * The Times' Books Bulletin * "The stories in Eisenberg's new collection Your Duck is My Duck do not really read as short stories at all, but as vignettes which transform into miniature novels, epics of torpor and treachery, rinsed through with intense, brilliant language." -- Catherine Taylor * The New Statesman * "These short stories are intelligent, hilarious and dark all at once - they almost feel like six mini-novels. Eisenberg writes about relationships, families, friendships, time grief and the fabric of daily life so brilliantly, you won't want to put it down." -- Marta Bausells * Elle * "Deborah Eisenberg excels in another kind of minimalism in her short story collection Your Duck is My Duck, conjuring a complex picture of our times in six parables. Short prose is where it's at." -- Anna Aslanyan * The Spectator/Books of the Year * "Comic, elegant and pitch perfect." * Vanity Fair * "These brilliant stories invoke the desire for something other than what you've been given, which applies as much to Eisenberg's characters, whose distracted desperation can't help, in the end, but reflect our own." * Kirkus (starred review) * "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. They are fearless, fierce, light-bearing stories, offered in defense of what still matters." * New York Observer * "Funny, grim, biting, and wise, Eisenberg is an undisputed master of the short story." * Publishers' Weekly (starred review) * "Deborah Eisenberg, chronicler of American insanity. Over three decades of fiction, the writer has managed to capture, with hilarious tenderness, the dysfunction of daily life." * The New York Times * "Deborah Eisenberg, chronicler of American insanity. Over three decades of fiction, the writer has managed to capture, with hilarious tenderness, the dysfunction of daily life." * The Boston Globe * "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 medias res as far as it can go." * Harper's Bazaar * "Deborah Eisenberg is consummately urban, as nonchalantly and inadvertently sophisticated as Proust." * The Atlantic * "Like other current masters of the short story-Joy Williams, Lydia Davis, Ben Marcus-Eisenberg works her own fertile ground so faithfully and assiduously that she brooks no comparison." * Elle * "Shudderingly intimate and mordantly funny." * The New York Times * "Outstanding . . . Eisenberg offers enough insight and intelligent observation to amply justify her reputation as the American Alice Munro." * Christian Science Monitor * "Hugely intelligent, funny, subtle, beautifully written, these stories reach beyond New York into the world." -- Tessa Hadley Profile: Deborah Eisenberg, Chronicler of American Insanity Over three decades of short fiction, the writer has managed to capture, with hilarious tenderness, the dysfunction of daily life in this country. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/27/magazine/deborah-eisenberg-chronicler-of-american-insanity.html -- Giles Harvey * The New York Times *