Your Duck Is My Duck: Stories

I bought this book after a positive review in the NYT. It is a weird insider book with little to redeem it except an occasional play with words. Most of it makes no sense, the stories are not stories but incomplete impressions of a truly narcissistic author. I tried very hard as an open minded reader to find some redeeming feature but besides her friends who indulged her or reviewers who pretended to be elites in the know this is a waste of money mess.

The stories made little sense. She used some interesting phrases and ways of saying things. the stories didn't lead anywhere nor did they encourage me to reflect on their connection to anything else. I read it based on a positive review that said she captured the spirit of the times very well. I missed it completely.

I can’t call this a review, because I am far from fair about the book. It is written in a style critics seem to love and I do not. For the same reasons I love well-developed setting, I despise what seems to me to be precious, I’m-so-smart-and-rich dialogue. Even when it is as well-written as this. So all I can say is that I only made it about half way before I closed it with great finality.

I'm not at all sure that a book review is necessarily all that helpful, unless you know the reviewer, or at very least, the reviewer's tastes in literature.It's a collection of short stories, none of which have any "point" and none of the characters are compelling in any way.Just good enough to keep reading in the hope that the next story is better than the one you're reading. Meh!

I'm usually not one for short stories. How many writers can put a mini-story - with characters and plots - into the 50 or so pages most short stories run? But Deborah Eisenberg has written six mini-stories that are incredibly readable in her new book, "Your Duck is My Duck". If there is a theme to the stories, it's probably the fact that most of the main characters are in a point of personal transition.I didn't like all six stories; I thought "The Third Tower" was a bit too science-fictiony for my taste. But the others, and most particularly "Recalculating", were tiny gems which were like snapshots into the characters' lives. In "Recalculating", Adam a young man raised on an Iowan farm, discovers an uncle he had never known while going through family pictures. Philip had left the farm early and had moved "away", returning only once. A few years pass and Adam is out of college and beginning his own journey away from Iowa. He hears about his now-famous uncle's death in London and decides to go to his memorial service. The time is the 1980's and Philip's family back home had been told he had died of "pneumonia". Adam's trip to London enmeshes him in Philip's world - a world he finds to his liking. The characters in "Recalculating" are brilliantly drawn; spare but full of life.The other five stories are as well written as "Recalulating". I'm going to look for Eisenberg's backlist.

Excellent, bittersweet grasp of all that is great and kooky about contemporary society in America and beyond. No “Happily ever After” or resolution or closure: an acceptance of life’s complexities and disappointments, artfully rendered.

I am so glad I ignored the hostile anti-intellectual rants against literature and literary critics and gave this collection a try! These are engaging, imaginative, beautifully written stories about fascinating, believable characters from many walks of life. (Whoever complained that they are all about rich people, obviously didn't read past the first story.) Unlike many contemporary short stories, they read like complete mini-novels, rather than fragments that the author gave up on in mid-thought. I am delighted to have discovered Deborah Eisenberg, and look forward to reading more by her.

This woman writes the socks off others. She’s now one of my favs and I read two or three good books a week. If you are partial to great literary fiction this is it.

Read about this in the NYT book review. I wasn't familiar with her. Now I want to read all of her stories. Such imaginative skillful, insightful stories.

Deborah Eisenberg's short stories are novels in miniature. Her characters -- some likeable, some not -- are people of today, living lives that don't fit easily into neat boxes. The writing never fails to capture their spirit.

My husband loved this book!

A series of stories that require no effort to consume. Like Tapas and wine. I would that I could write as this.