Deborah Eisenberg (born November 20, 1945) is an American short story writer, actress and teacher. She was a professor of writing at Columbia University.

Early life Eisenberg was born in Winnetka, Illinois. Her family is Jewish. She grew up in suburban Chicago, Illinois, and moved to New York City in the late 1960s.

Of her family origins, Eisenberg told The Paris Review:Those of us who are the grandchildren of immigrants often have a void in our psyche that reflects a situation of danger or terror that our grandparents endured. The first generation born in the United States often tries to erase or suppress what they know of their parents' experience in order to provide a level playing field for their children, but in fact experience and fears can be transmitted in various forms across many generations. Many of us grew up knowing nothing, or next to nothing, about the horrors our grandparents lived through, and when we search for the source of certain anxieties, all we can locate is a kind of blank inscrutability.

Career Eisenberg was an editorial assistant at The New York Review of Books in 1973. She taught at the University of Virginia from 1994 until 2011, when she accepted a teaching position at Columbia University's MFA writing program.

Writing Eisenberg published her first story, "Flotsam", when she was nearly 40. Since then, she has published five collections of stories: Transactions in a Foreign Currency (1986), Under the 82nd Airborne (1992), All Around Atlantis (1997), Twilight of the Superheroes (2006), and Your Duck Is My Duck (2018). Reviewing Twilight of the Superheroes for The New York Times Book Review, Ben Marcus called Eisenberg "one of the most important fiction writers now at work. This work is great." Reviewing the same collection in The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani wrote that Eisenberg has a "playwright's ear for dialogue and a journalistic eye for the askew detail". Eisenberg's first two story collections were republished in one volume as The Work (So Far) of Deborah Eisenberg (1997). Her first four collections were reprinted in The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg (2010).

Eisenberg's later books include Your Duck Is My Duck (2018), a story collection that continues her exploration of contemporary relationships and moral complexity.

Eisenberg has also written a play, Pastorale, which was produced at Second Stage in New York City in 1982. She has written for such magazines as The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The Yale Review. She is the credited screenwriter of the 2020 Steven Soderbergh film Let Them All Talk, for which she wrote a 50-page treatment from which the actors largely improvised the dialogue.

In 2026, Eisenberg and her partner, Wallace Shawn, stepped in on short notice to substitute for sick cast members in the off-Broadway production of Shawn's play What We Did Before Our Moth Days.

Awards Eisenberg received the Rea Award for the Short Story in 2000, an award granted for significant contribution to the short story form. She has also received a Whiting Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship, both in 1987; and six O. Henry Awards, in 1986, 1995, 1997, 2002, 2006, and 2013."The O. Henry Prize Stories: Past Winners List". Random House. randomhouse.com. Retrieved October 1, 2018.

In 2007, Eisenberg was elected into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 2009 she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. She won the 2011 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg.

Eisenberg received the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story in May 2015.

Your Duck Is My Duck was one of three finalists for The Story Prize for the year 2018.

Criticism of PEN award In April 2015, in an exchange with PEN America's Executive Director Suzanne Nossel published in The Intercept by Glenn Greenwald, Eisenberg criticized PEN's decision to give its annual Freedom of Expression Courage Award to Charlie Hebdo, calling the choice "an opportunistic exploitation of the horrible murders in Paris to justify and glorify offensive material expressing Islamophobic and nationalistic sentiments already widely shared in the Western world." Joining Eisenberg in her protest of PEN's award ceremony were Peter Carey, Francine Prose, Teju Cole, Rachel Kushner and Taiye Selasi. In addition, 145 writers—including Junot Díaz, Lorrie Moore, Joyce Carol Oates, and Michael Cunningham—signed a letter protesting PEN's decision.

Personal life Eisenberg lives in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York City.Harvey, Giles (September 27, 2018). "Deborah Eisenberg, Chronicler of American Insanity". The New York Times Magazine. Retrieved October 1, 2018. Print version on Sunday, September 30, 2018, pp. 52-56, 68; here p. 54.

Her longtime companion is actor-writer Wallace Shawn. She was frequently referred to as "Debbie" in the film My Dinner with Andre, in which she also appears as a dining patron in the restaurant near the beginning.

Bibliography Short fiction Collections

StoriesShort stories unless otherwise noted. + Title Publication Collected in "Flotsam" The New Yorker (September 3, 1984) Transactions in a foreign currency "Transactions in a foreign currency" "What It Was Like, Seeing Chris" The New Yorker (July 29, 1985) "A Lesson in Traveling Light" Vanity Fair (July 1985) "Broken Glass" The New Yorker (December 2, 1985) "Rafe's Coat" Transactions in a Foreign Currency (1986) "Days" "A Cautionary Tale" The New Yorker (March 23, 1987) Under the 82nd Airborne "Presents" The New Yorker (July 20, 1987) "Under the 82nd Airborne" The New Yorker (February 13, 1989) "The Robbery" Bomb 29 (Fall 1989) "The Custodian" The New Yorker (March 12, 1990) "In the Station" Bomb 36 (Summer 1991) "Holy Week" Western Humanities Review #45.3 (Autumn 1991) "Tlaloc's paradise" Voice Literary Supplement (May 1992) All around Atlantis "Someone to talk to" The New Yorker (September 27, 1993) "Across the lake" Voice Literary Supplement (November 1993) "The girl who left her sock on the floor" The New Yorker (December 5, 1994) "Mermaids" The Yale Review (July 1996) "Rosie gets a soul"Credited to The New Yorker, but not found in their archive All around Atlantis (1997) "All around Atlantis" "Like It or Not" The Threepenny Review #85 (Spring 2001) Twilight of the Superheroes "Some Other, Better Otto" The Yale Review (January 2003) "Revenge of the Dinosaurs" Tin House #17 (Fall 2003) "Window" Tin House #19 (Spring 2004) "Twilight of the Superheroes" Final Edition (Autumn 2004) "The Flaw in the Design" Virginia Quarterly Review #82.1 (Winter 2006) "Recalculating" The New York Review of Books (July 14, 2011) Your Duck Is My Duck "Your Duck Is My Duck" Fence (Fall 2011) "Cross Off and Move On" The New York Review of Books (July 12, 2012) "Taj Mahal" The Paris Review #214 (Fall 2015) "The third tower" * Ploughshares (Spring 2018)* "Merge" Virginia Quarterly Review 94.3 (Fall 2018) Anthologies

Plays

Other

References

External links

Deborah Eisenberg archive from The New York Review of Books

Profile at Whiting Foundation Interview at KCRW Bookworm