"Davis . . . prized for her sly wit and inventiveness, presents a new array of piquant and elegant tales. A master of the extremely short story, some told in one sentence, Davis neatly castigates the vicious circle that is family, the insidious toxins of relationships, and the oddities of intellectual and creative pursuits. Literary and artistic erudition and fluency in loneliness, disappointment, and fretfulness shape these mordant yet pirouetting stories . . . Davis' attempts to quantify predicaments to eliminate emotion intensify it instead, which is but one of life's many ironies Davis so artfully reveals."—Donna Seaman, Booklist

"Deborah Eisenberg offers commanding proof that in the right hands, the short story can be a legitimate art form, not just a test run for writers warming up to write a novel . . . There aren't many contemporary novels as shudderingly intimate and mordantly funny as Eisenberg's best stories, and her latest collection, her fifth in 20 years, should finally establish her as one of the most important fiction writers now at work . . . Eisenberg has given is these remarkable stories, machines of perfect revelation deftly constructed by a contemporary master."—Ben Marcus, The New York Times Book Review

"Deborah Eisenberg writes with a playwright's quick, bristling ear for dialogue and a painter's affection for nuance and image . . . Miss Eisenberg has found words to capture all the fleeting, ambivalent emotions of daily experience . . . and she's turned those elusive feelings into shimmering stories that possess the power to charm and to move us."—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times