The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg

The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg
For the past month, Deborah Eisenberg has slowly brought my reading habit to a surprising standstill. I dove into this fat, wonderful collection like a man in a hot dog eating contest. No one writes the kind of strange, deeply intuitive short story that Eisenberg writes. You wouldn't know it from the heft of this volume, but she doesn't write them very often either. Maybe a story a year. So very quickly I began forcing myself to put the book aside. I'd stop to look at her author photo.

Anything to slow down the moment when there were no more left. The end was near. Then it was very near. And then I had to stop. If I kept on I'd be caromed out of Eisenberg's world and back into, well, something else. And I was not ready for something else.