Under the 82nd Airborne [Hardcover]

Deborah Eisenberg (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 1992

Characters make discoveries about themselves and their relationships, in seven stories that comment on topics ranging from suburbia to Central American politics. By the author of Transactions in a Foreign Currency. 12,500 first printing.

Editorial Reviews

From Kirkus Reviews

Once more, as with her debut collection, Transactions in a Foreign Currency (1986), Eisenberg's range of interests and formal containers is very wide. Her stories take a while getting up to speed, but because there is so interesting a stylist behind them, we give them the time. Still, the problem, as with her first collection, is that the voice sometimes seems all that there is of substance. Two political stories, both about Central America--the title piece and ``Holy Week''--are finally thinned by the predictability of their old-hat premises: that an innocent abroad apprehends rottenness soon enough. Two stories, ``A Cautionary Tale'' and ``In The Station,'' are a bit too portentous about Manhattan flakiness (in the first) or about the vicious irresponsibility of the young bored rich (in the second). Eisenberg's social intelligence is more subtly flexed in ``The Robbery''--a dinner party at which prejudices and presumptions are imperceptibly dismantled; and the world of rich actors and coke- dealers gets an improbable and satisfying burnish in ``Presents.'' The book's most remarkable story, though, is the already anthologized ``The Custodian''--again innocence lost, but in a tale that suggests how cruelly manipulative of reality innocence itself may be. Eisenberg here gives up most of her gorgeous yet finally merely verbal mannerisms (``His voice was a graphitelike emollient, a granular medium in which the words spread out soothingly'') in favor of sustained mood-building that results in a story of finely shifting, nearly dreamlike amorality. In this story (though in no others here to this degree), Eisenberg exhibits her potential mastery. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 293 pages
• Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux (T); 1st edition (February 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374280681
• ISBN-13: 978-0374280680
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.7 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,905,384 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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