Rate this book

The Collected Stories (2010)

by Deborah Eisenberg(Favorite Author)

4.13 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

0312429894 (ISBN13: 9780312429898)

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

Picador

review 1: I love to read writers who come up with multiple protagonists in their stories, not just the same person in differing settings. Deborah Eisenberg took me from the city, the country, to crack houses and among holocaust survivors with many different voices in this compilation of her four previously published short story collections. This compilation won the PEN Faulkner award in 2010, but I still had a difficult time finding it locally. I had to eventually purchase a copy -gasp!- but I am glad I did; it was worth the money.
review 2: This may be a case of me just not "getting" it, but, truthfully, I simply found these stories to be fairly unremarkable. This is a big, career-spanning, "greatest hits" sort of anthology, so if you like Eisenberg or are looking for a... more good introduction to her work, this volume is certainly worthwhile. But the stories didn't do a lot for me; they are all fairly pedestrian "relationship" stories, very talky, very long, and largely devoid of anything that struck me as particularly interesting. The critical take on these stories is that they confront or subvert cliches in some way, but, in truth, I just think they embrace cliches. Worth checking into, I suppose, but clearly not my thing. less

Download links for: The Collected Stories

Advertising