Your Duck is My Duck

By Deborah Eisenberg

***A SPECTATOR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR 2021***

By turns dark and hilarious, at times solemn and mysterious, Your Duck is My Duck cements Deborah Eisenberg’s reputation as one of America’s greatest living writers of fiction.

“Hugely intelligent, funny, subtle, beautifully written, these stories reach beyond New York into the world."—Tessa Hadley

“If our culture can produce a writer this wonderful, there must be something beautiful about us yet.”—George Saunders

“[A] scintillating showcase.”-Anthony Cummins, The Observer

“Shudderingly intimate and mordantly funny.”—The New York Times

Now in B-format Paperback
Each of the six stories that make up this new collection—Eisenberg’s first for twelve years—has the heft and complexity of a novel. With her own inexorable logic and uncanny ability to conjure up the strange states of mind and emotion that constitute our daily consciousness, Eisenberg pulls us as if by gossamer threads through the lives of her characters. In her 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.

"Ducks are having a literary moment."—The Times' Books Bulletin

“Comic, elegant and pitch perfect.”—Vanity Fair

• Language: English
• Publisher: Europa Editions
• Release date: Aug 16, 2019
• ISBN: 9781787701946

Deborah Eisenberg

Deborah Eisenberg is the author of several previous collections of stories. The recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award and a Guggenheim fellowship, she lives in New York City and teaches at the University of Virginia.

Reviews for Your Duck is My Duck

[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.