Twilight of the Superheroes: Stories

by Deborah Eisenberg

Book Overview

Deborah Eisenberg is nearly unmatched in her mastery of the short-story form. Now, in her newest collection, she demonstrates once again her virtuosic abilities in precisely distilled, perfectly shaped studies of human connection and disconnection. From a group of friends whose luck in acquiring a luxurious Manhattan sublet turns to disaster as their balcony becomes a front-row seat to the catastrophe of 9/11, to the too painful love of a brother...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312425937
• ISBN13: 9780312425937
• Release Date: January 2007
• Publisher: St. Martins Press-3PL
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.52 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.5" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

One of the best short story collections in years

Deborah Eisenberg's stories are highly intelligent, witty, and complex--so complex they're like small novels. They're actually about something, too. This collection is her apotheosis as an artist (thus far); and she has just won a well-deserved MacArthur "Genius" grant!

Eisenberg: a short-story superhero.

Deborah Eisenberg lives in New York City and teaches at the University of Virginia. It is not surprising that she is the winner of the Rea Award for the Short Story. The half dozen stories collected in the TWILIGHT OF THE SUPERHEROES (Eisenberg's seventh collection) demonstrate her remarkable talent for creating unpredictable narratives and characters that are complicated, difficult, and dysfunctional. The title story, for instance, involves a group of twentysomething friends, whose luck in acquiring a Manhattan loft turns to sudden disaster as their balcony becomes a front-row seat to the catastrophe of 9/11; "Some Other, Better Otto," reveals the painful love of an irascible lawyer for his mentally ill sister, Sharon; in "The Flaw in the Design," a diplomat's wife frets over her son's increasingly bizarre political rants, as she falls into an affair hoping to discover "a music box life." Eisenberg's memorable stories resonate with intelligence, humor, and angst. G. Merritt

Stunning

The stories in this book are absolutely stunning. I want to know more about every single character. I care about them and hope that during my lifetime Ms. Eisernberg writes more stories with these characters. They are real, yet each one represents something. Amazing.

Classic Short Stories

Ms. Eisenberg is one of the masters of the short story, winning award after award. Her stories have the tight composition characteristic of writing that has to tell a story in a few pages. The actions, the characters have to be distilled down to the essense of the story. In short stories you do not have the option of stringing out the character development over time, each word, each sentence has to ahve meaning. Here are six of her latest stories. If you are a fan of hers, here is your next fix. If you are new, you are in for a special delight. Here are characters living out their lives as best they can. They are limited by their own abilities, their own beliefs, their families, and basically the beds that they have made for themselves. Ms. Eisenberg is provessor of fictional writing at the University of Virginia.

Superb Series Of Short Stories

Ms. Eisenberg has a wicked sense of literary creation. The colorful book jacket alone encompasses so many meanings and allusions. The battered Batman-like superhero watches over the mayhem of 9-11 and over the New York City loft where Ms. Eisenberg's characters of the titled story have gathered. The title itself invokes the opera of Richard Wagner, "The Twilight of the Gods." And the reader has not even reached the actual story itself. The author is an acquired taste who makes the reader work at understanding the motives and actions of her flawed but all-too-human characters -- this is not beach reading. For those who enjoy the craft of her story-telling, the reader is referred to last year's "Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg" and to 1996's "The Stories (So Far) of Deborah Eisenberg" -- the latter is the reprinting together of her first two books of stories while the former is a 'best of" collection from all her published works.