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You couldn’t miss the arrival of Deborah Eisenberg’s latest short story collection titled “Your Duck is My Duck” if you are into socially aware, well-written fiction. The NY Times review of September 25th stated:

In a classic Deborah Eisenberg short story, “Holy Week,” a travel writer visiting an unnamed country in Central America complacently compiles adjectives as he reviews a restaurant: “relaxed,” “intimate,” “romantic.”

This being Eisenberg, things take a turn. A very different set of words are required to actually summon the day; let’s say, “anxiety,” “empire” and “guns.” These might be the same words we would compile to describe a visit to the world of Eisenberg.

Apparently, the new collection is not quite as explicitly political as those in “Under the 82nd Airborne”, a 1989 collection that referenced the wars in Central America. In the new collection, she remains political but more obliquely so. Once again from the review:

The later work is about emerging from isolation and complacency, about larger questions of what it means to live an ethical life — and, as Eisenberg has said, whether such a thing is even possible for an American. These stories emerge from the ashes of the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, out of despoliation and environmental plunder.

Eisenberg was in the back of my mind when I came across a long and fawning profile of her in yesterday’s Times magazine section titled “Deborah Eisenberg, Chronicler of American Insanity”. It turns out that she has been living with Wallace Shawn for forty years. Shawn is the son of William Shawn, the long-time editor of The New Yorker Magazine under whose stewardship veered left on a fairly consistent basis. After his departure, it shifted to the right although you can find an occasionally trenchant analysis amidst the liberal dross.

full: https://louisproyect.org/2018/10/08/deborah-eisenberg-short-stories-with-a-superiority-complex/
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