The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg

The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg brings four books into one volume of nearly a thousand pages, published by Picador in 2010: Transactions in a Foreign Currency (1986), Under the 82nd Airborne (1992), All Around Atlantis (1997) and Twilight of the Superheroes (2006). Together they hold twenty seven stories written across more than two decades. Eisenberg began writing at thirty, after she quit smoking, and she works slowly: her first story, "Days," took three years.

The stories range from New York apartments to places far from home, and they follow people trying to work out what they feel. In an early one, "What It Was Like, Seeing Chris," a teenage girl afraid to ask her eye doctor whether she is going blind starts stopping at a bar after her appointments and meets a man of twenty seven who tells her, "I'm really crazy about you, but I can't ask you to see me." "Some Other, Better Otto," which NPR's reviewer found the funniest in the book, follows a gay man who has kept a careful distance from his disapproving family until his brilliant, mentally ill sister breaks down. In the long story "Window" a naive young woman drifts into a backwoods life with a secretive, controlling man in the arms trade who leaves his toddler son in her care. The title story of Twilight of the Superheroes is set in Manhattan around September 11, among a group of friends in their twenties facing an uncertain future.

These are not quick reads. Eisenberg's sentences circle and pause, and her characters often understand their situations later than the reader does. Maud Newton, reviewing the collection for NPR, heard in her "lucid but rambling narrative melancholia" echoes of Anita Brookner, Jean Rhys, David Foster Wallace, Alice Munro and Lorrie Moore. The book works best taken one story at a time, with a gap between them; readers of Munro who want an American, urban, more anxious counterpart will find one here.