Your Duck Is My Duck: Stories

Written by Deborah Eisenberg

Narrated by Deborah Eisenberg, Wallace Shawn, Julianne Moore and Josh Hamilton

A much-anticipated collection of brilliantly observant short stories from one of the great American masters of the form, performed by a remarkable cast: Deborah Eisenberg, Julianne Moore, Josh Hamilton, and Wallace Shawn.

At times raucously hilarious, at times charming and delightful, at times as solemn and mysterious as a pond at midnight, Deborah Eisenberg’s stories gently compel us to confront the most disturbing truths about ourselves—from our intimate lives as lovers, parents, and children, to our equally troubling roles as citizens on a violent, terrifying planet.

Each of the six stories in Your Duck is My Duck, her first collection since 2006, has the heft and complexity of a novel. With her own inexorable but utterly unpredictable logic and her almost uncanny ability to conjure the strange states of mind and emotion that constitute our daily consciousness, Eisenberg pulls us as if by gossamer threads through her characters—a tormented woman whose face determines her destiny; a group of film actors shocked to read a book about their past; a privileged young man who unexpectedly falls into a love affair with a human rights worker caught up in an all-consuming quest that he doesn't understand.

In Eisenberg’s world, the forces of money, sex, and power cannot be escaped, and the force of history, whether confronted or denied, cannot be evaded. No one writes better about time, tragedy and grief, and the indifferent but beautiful universe around us.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Sep 25, 2018
• ISBN: 9780062864680

Deborah Eisenberg

Deborah Eisenberg is a MacArthur Foundation Fellow and the recipient of honors including the 2011 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, a Whiting Writer’s Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Eisenberg has published four collections of stories: Transactions in a Foreign Currency (1986), Under the 82nd Airborne (1992), All Around Atlantis (1997), and Twilight of the Superheroes (2006). Her first two story collections were republished in one volume as The Stories (So Far) of Deborah Eisenberg (1997). All four volumes were reprinted in 2010 in The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg (2010). She is a professor of writing at Columbia University.

[Kevin Woosley · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Eh. Alternates between touching and profound, or vapid and diffuse.

[kristelh_15 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A series of 6 short stories by American author, Deborah Eisenberg. The back of the book states that the author presents characters swimming or drowning in a disintegrating environment. Some are former Hollywood actors, an entitled young man who falls into an unlikely love affair with a human rights worker, a woman whose face illustrates her family history, a girl receiving treatment for a psychological affliction, and a politically conscious puppeteer.

The stories are;
1. Your Duck is My Duck - meh
2. Taj Mahal - meh
3. Cross off and Move On - okay
4. Merge - ok
5. The Third Tower (don't remember much)
6. Recalculating - meh

I don't appreciate short stories much so another person may enjoy these more than I did.

[randymetcalfe · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The six stories collected here range from dystopian horror to elegiac memorial to quirky social forensics. Most involve extended families, some non-traditional, weariness at the state of the world, and, often, incomprehension. For me, the collection was front-loaded with the best of the stories at the start of the book. I especially liked the title story, “Your Duck is My Duck,” in which the protagonist is very much at sea when drawn into opulent but distasteful surroundings. Her sideways look at things is charming. “Taj Mahal” contrasts multiple views of a milieu, focussing on a clutch of actors and the director who helped make them famous. It has lovely shifting perspectives and just enough ennui to captivate but not so much as to irritate. “Cross Off and Move On” is a retrospective of an extended family filled with misperceptions and well-preserved bile. Again, the protagonist has a unusual take on her situation that holds the reader’s attention.

At their best these stories are very good indeed. But the book as a whole suffers from the inclusion of weaker stories that seem to be just filling it out.

Gently recommended.

[lisapeet · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Deborah Eisenberg is a favorite short story writer of mine, and while this wasn't my top favorite collection of hers there was plenty here to like. Her wonderfully knotty plots and un-pin-downable relationships, and the language is, as ever, really unexpected and full of delights. Language and what it does/can do/can't do is a theme that runs through many of the stories here (and many of her stories in general, but it was thrown into particularly sharp focus in this collection). My favorites, “Cross Off and Move On" and "Recalculating," I had read in the NY Review of Books, and they felt to me to be the most fully realized of the bunch—the others had varying ratios of offbeat, marvelous writing to too much punctuation, a quirk of Eisenberg's that sometimes drives me nuts. But it's a neat collection, never boring, and definitely worth a read for anyone who likes a lot to chew on in their short fiction.