Twilight of the Superheroes

 

"For the past two decades, Deborah Eisenberg has had to content herself with being esteemed rather than merely famous. Her stories are careful chronicles of contemporary life, unfolding from the prismatic perspective of a narrator both wise and intimate with her characters. The quality is what you might call high realism, a definition necessary only because so many other unreal states have crowded the genre. The voice is knowing, even insinuating, but there's a regard for humanity that keeps the somber cast of her stories from taking over. She writes . . . in the tradition of the old story lovers like William Trevor and Lorrie Moore, connected mostly by their pristine craft and respect for the thickness of the form. . . Her stories reveal all the steely beauty of a knife wrapped in velvet."—Gail Caldwell, The Boston Globe

 

"Eisenberg's . . . collection of stories confirms her talent for fiction that, like Chekhov's, insinuate you right into the character's gnarled hearts, by methods so subtle and slippery that you're not sure where you are or how you got there."—Lisa Zeidner, The Washington Post Book World

 

"That's how it is for the people in Eisenberg's new book of stories, Twilight of the Superheroes. They meander with little purpose through their mystifying days, gazing toward sprawling futures full of nothing in particular, blinking like newborn mice as they watch their accidental comforts—the swank apartment, the too-good wine, the little blue-painted, rent-free room—evaporate as comforts always do . . . But Eisenberg, with her wide embrace of metaphor and keen sense of the eternal—the endlessly renewing cycle of human puttering—understands that behind every unexceptional face are notions and visions no one else has ever known. Eisenberg has long been in the business of elevating regular folk to literary status. Her stories are so skillfully crafted that they seem composed more of shapes and textures than of printed words."—Judith Lewis, Los Angeles Times

 

"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 begin perfected at the core. The half-dozen long stories here put her light-years ahead of most story writers in terms of capturing the feeling tones of the world around us and the people in it . . . Her stories are driven by emotive perceptions, as though the usual compact and condensed emotions of a classic epiphany were suffused throughout an entire 20- or 30- or 40-page tale."—San Francisco Chronicle

 

"Eisenberg offers enough insight and intelligent observations to amply justify her reputation as the American Alice Munro."—The Christian Science Monitor

 

“In her new book, her best, she spins six intricate, fully realized short fictions, several of novella length . . . A rich, subtle, enlivening work that will, I wager, withstand the unforeseen assaults of time.”—Haim Chertok, Congress Monthly

"With gratitude . . . we turn to Deborah Eisenberg’s collection Twilight of the Superheroes.  Eisenberg’s stories, like Alice Munro’s, are unfashionably long . . . Other authors seem sometimes not to have bothered considering the more complicated, human consequences of their literary conceits because they were restricting themselves to fifteen manuscript pages.  Unfazed by any such limit, Eisenberg allows consequences to evolve, to evoke new actions, to reveal truths that surprise us even as we recognize she was aiming at this revelation all along.  She has lived with these stories, come to know the warp and woof of their fabric, and so we are quickly persuaded to put ourselves in her hands  . . . The delightful language here—its assonances and consonances, the deadly irony of that exclamation point—lets the reader enjoy the music of Eisenberg’s knife.  More to the point . . . we are not watching [a character] get his comeuppance, but present in the moment when love and its silent companion, mortality, briefly extract the protagonist’s gall from his decent heart . . . Eisenberg thus becomes, in Chekov’s phrase, one of those writers who intoxicate us.  It is a seduction hard earned.  When giving their quirky ideas a chance to play on the page, other writers would do well to consider how these stories, at their great length, skim along, whereas others much shorter make the reader feel as though she were clearing brush from every step of the path . . . The two or three best stories is Eisenberg’s collection seem not only motivated by their necessities, but necessary, whereas the lesser stories discussed above seem at best ornamental.  And is it not true, of our finest short fictions, that they become for their readers like breath and heartbeat?"—Lucy Ferriss, Michigan Quarterly Review

"Eisenberg's filament-thin weavings of desire, obligation, and missed opportunities remind one strongly of Henry James; and in her language and sense of fractured consciousness she also has a close relation with Virginia Woolf: Like both, she tends to cover the anxious failures of the well to do. These stories are intense, invariably erotic, and thoroughly startling. Eisenberg is a master of condensation and reconstruction, making beautiful murals from broken glass."—Vince Passaro, O magazine