Customer Reviews

The Stories (So Far) of Deborah Eisenberg

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

There is something delicious and maddening about D.E's stories. Delicious because her prose is so cool and lucid, her take on emotional subtext in the interaction between people so accute. Maddening because she brings you so close to people's souls. There is something infuriating about knowing people like that and then having them vanish. In a way it's an argument for novels, though satiation always makes youa little ill.

I think D.E. is a brilliant realist. I've just surfed around the Amazon reader reviews for the first time. It's amazing, but worrisom, all those voices, because so many seem enthralled by fantasy. Eisenberg is about the real. That she is able to elucidate often painful situations with such beauty and wit is our good fortune.

Honest, daring, funny, and smart, perfectly calibrated, perfectly observed. No short story writer today is better than Eisenberg at conveying the shifting nuances of self-doubt, self-consciousness, and self-deception.

The stories in this book, particularly "What it was like seeing chris", "the custodian", "days", "a cautionary tale",and "rafe's coat" are brilliantly written, haunting stories that describe feelings and states of mind that you would have thought to be indescribable. You are really MISSING OUT if you do not read Ms. Eisenberg's stories. I read these over and over again and NEVER tire of them...my book is already falling apart!

At her very best, Eisenberg compares favorably with giants such as Flannery O'Connor and even Chekov. "What It Was Like, Seeing Chris" is definitely the author at her best--richly provocative, continually surprising, virtuosic in covering registers from the mundane to the philosophic and epiphanic. Should anyone like to share impressions about this story, I'd love to hear from you

Eisenberg's range is so lovely and satisfying. In every story, one finds sentences imbued with brittle wit and deep sadness. She's a lot like Lorrie Moore, whom I also love.

I can think of no contemporary writer as underappreciated and brilliant as Deborah Eisenberg. Eisenberg plumbs emotional depths few writers dare even approach and yet never at the expense of the heart. I highly reccomend all of her work to anyone who appreciates excellent, brave writing.

The short form doesn't have a better exemplar of what can be done with the story than Deborah Eisenberg.

Deborah Eisenberg is an exquisite writer. She is quirky and unique and certainly not to everyone's taste. However, if her modern, idiosyncratic voice appeals to you, you will relish her stories. I haven't found another short story writer (except for Alice Munro, whom I adore) who satifies like DE. This is a volume containing the stories of her first 2 books of stories.

So far I have only read the first four stories of the book, but I have found them all practically unbearable. Though Eisenberg perfectly hones in on many abstract feelings, for the most part, I find the barely-there plots hollow and pointless. Maybe I just don't "get" it, but I can't relate to the shallow characters who seem to usually be spouting meaningless dialogue that leads to nothing. I read constantly and *rarely* come across anything I don't like. Disappointing.