Deborah Eisenberg is a MacArthur Foundation Fellow and the recipient of numerous honors including the 2011 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, a 1987 Whiting Award in Fiction, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the 2019 Hadada Award for lifetime achievement from The Paris Review. Eisenberg has published five collections of stories: Transactions in a Foreign Currency (1986), Under the 82nd Airborne (1992), All Around Atlantis (1997), Twilight of the Superheroes (2006), and Your Duck Is My Duck (2018). Her first two story collections were republished in one volume as The Stories (So Far) of Deborah Eisenberg (1997), and the first four volumes were reprinted in The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg (2010). She teaches at Columbia University School of the Arts.
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Transactions in a Foreign CurrencyStoriesFrom"What It Was Like, Seeing Chris"
While I sit with all the other patients in the waiting room, I always think that I will ask Dr. Wald what exactly is happening to my eyes, but when I go into his examining room alone it is dark, with a circle of light on the wall, and the doctor is standing with his back to me arranging silver instruments on a cloth. The big chair is empty for me to go sit in, and each time I feel as if I have gone into a dream straight from being awake, the way you do sometimes at night, and I go to the chair without saying anything.
Transactions in a Foreign Currency:Stories -
Transactions in a Foreign CurrencyStoriesFrom"Flotsam"
“Charlotte!” Cinder said. “I know what this looks like, but I was an absolute wreck when Mitchell got here – wasn’t I, Mitchell? – and he literally glued me back together. You know what we should do, though. I’m absolutely starving. We should get some pirogi. Hey, I’ve learned this interesting new fact about men. The more weight they make you gain, the more attractive it means they are. God. Why can’t I be one of those little twitching things who shred their food when something goes wrong? I wish I were willowy and thin like you, Charlie.”
“You are willowy and thin,” I said. “I’m bony and big, like a dinosaur skeleton in a museum.”
“Dinosaur skeleton.” Mitchell centered me slowly in his gaze, and I faltered. “It’s been a long, long time since I thought about one of those,” he said.
“Mitchell, darling,” Cinder said, straddling him to massage his shoulders, “how could I get you to go next door and get us some pirogi? Like three orders, with extra sour cream. I am ravenous.”
“That stuff I glued you together with sort of absorbed my liquid assets,” he said.
“I have money,” I said, handing him a ten.
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Transactions in a Foreign CurrencyStoriesFrom"A Lesson in Traveling Light"
“Where do they live?” I said.
Lee took out a big U.S. road map. “They’re over here, in Baltimore.”
“That’s so far,” I said, following his finger.
“In a sense,” he said. “But on the other hand, look at, say, Pittsburgh.” His finger alighted inches from where we were. “Or Columbus.”
“Or Louisville!” I said. “Look how far that is – to Louisville!”
“You think that’s far?” Lee said. “Well, listen to this – ready? Poplar Bluff!”
“Tulsa!” I said. “Wait – Oklahoma City!”
We both started to shout.
“Cheyenne!”
“Flagstaff!”
“Needles, Barstow, Bishop!”
“Eureka!” we both yelled at once.
We sat back and eyed the map. “That was some trip,” Lee said.
Transactions in a Foreign Currency:Stories
"A masterly collection . . . Instead of forcing her characters' stories into neat, arbitrary, preordained shapes, Deborah Eisenberg allows them to grow organically into oddly shaped, asymmetrical narratives—narratives that possess all the surprising twists and dismaying turns of real life." —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times [on Twilight of the Superheroes]
"With every story in this superb new collection, Deborah Eisenberg, one of America's finest writers, offers new ways of seeing and feeling, as if something were being perfected at the core. The half dozen long stories here put her light years ahead of most story writers." —Alan Cheuse, The San Francisco Chronicle [on Twilight of the Superheroes]
“Small masterpieces . . . [a] dazzling collection . . . Like Alice Munro, virtually her only equal in the field, Deborah Eisenberg here seems incapable of writing a bad short story . . . She focuses on misfits, people who don't feel at home in the world. So skilled is she at developing these characters as engagingly "ordinary" that we find ourselves identifying with them without realizing how we got there . . . Eisenberg's writing at times approaches the beauty of a line of poetry. She manipulates her readers with a master's blend of humor and poignancy. Her stories are wondrous . . .” —David Wiegand, The San Francisco Chronicle [on All Around Atlantis]
Selected Works
- Print Books
- Powell's
- Barnes & Noble
- Alibris
- Abe Books
- Samuel French