Deborah Eisenberg

Deborah Eisenberg
Eisenberg in 2009
Born	(1945-11-20) November 20, 1945 Winnetka, Illinois[1]
Occupation	Short-story writer, actor, teacher
Alma mater	Marlboro College; The New School[2]
Notable awards	1987-88 Whiting Writers' Award 1987-88 Guggenheim Fellowship 2000 Rea Award for the Short Story 2003 Lannan Literary Fellowship 2009 MacArthur Fellowship 2011 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction O. Henry Awards, 1986, 1995, 1997, 2001.
Partner	Wallace Shawn[3]

Deborah Eisenberg (born November 20, 1945) is an American short-story writer, actor and teacher.

Biography

Eisenberg was born in Winnetka, Illinois. Her family was Jewish.^[2] She grew up in suburban Chicago, Illinois, and moved to New York City in the late 1960s. She was an editorial assistant at The New York Review of Books in 1973.^[4] Her longtime companion is actor-writer Wallace Shawn.^[3] She taught at the University of Virginia from 1994 until 2011, when she accepted a teaching position at Columbia University's MFA writing program. Eisenberg lives in New York City.^[5]

Writing

Eisenberg has written 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 Work (So Far) of Deborah Eisenberg (1997).^[6] All four short-story collections were reprinted in 2010 in The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg (2010).^[7]

She has also written a play, Pastorale, which was produced at Second Stage in New York City in 1982. Eisenberg has written for such magazines as The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The Yale Review.^[6]

Awards and criticism

Eisenberg was the recipient of the Rea Award for the Short Story in the year 2000, an award granted for significant contribution to the short story form. She has also been the recipient of such awards as a Whiting Writers' Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the O. Henry Awards.^[8]

In 2007, Eisenberg was elected into the American Academy of Arts and Letters,^[1] and in 2009 she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship.^[9] She won the 2011 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg.^[10]

Ben Marcus, reviewing Twilight of the Superheroes for The New York Times Book Review, called Eisenberg "one of the most important fiction writers now at work. This work is great."^[11]

Controversies

On April 2015, in an exchange with American PEN’s Executive Director Suzanne Nossel regarding PEN’s decision to bestow its annual Freedom of Expression Courage Award to Charlie Hebdo, she said the Charlie Hebdo journalists and cartoonists, murdered by Muslim terrorists in Paris earlier that year, "expended their courage, and ten of them lost their lives, in what was essentially a parochial, irrelevant, misconceived, misdirected, relatively trivial, and more or less obsolete campaign against clericalism." She also compared the work of Charlie Hebdo editors with efforts to "bait a hallucinating and armed soldier, to walk around naked in the dead of winter, to jump off a roof, to drink from a sewer, or to attempt sexual intercourse with a wild boar", and furthermore stated that their purposes were "pitiful, foolish, and immensely destructive". As Eisenberg put it in her original letter, the Charlie Hebdo award appears to be “an opportunistic exploitation of the horrible murders in Paris to justify and glorify offensive material expressing anti-Islamic and nationalistic sentiments already widely shared in the Western world.”

Bibliography

Story collections

• Transactions in a Foreign Currency. Knopf. February 12, 1986. ISBN 978-0-394-54598-1. 
• Under the 82nd Airborne. Faber. 1992. ISBN 978-0-571-16439-4. 
• All Around Atlantis. Simon & Schuster. 1998. ISBN 978-0-671-02462-8. 
• The Stories (So Far) of Deborah Eisenberg. Noonday Press. 1997. ISBN 978-0-374-52492-0. 
• Twilight of the Superheroes. Picador. 2007. ISBN 978-0-330-44460-6. 
• The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg. Picador. 2010. ISBN 978-0-312-42989-8. 

Play

• Pastorale. Samuel French, Inc. 1983. ISBN 978-0-573-61363-0. 

Other

• Ken Heyman (1988). Hipshot: One-Handed, Auto-Focus Photographs by a Master Photographer. Foreword Eisenberg. Aperture. 
• Air: 24 Hours. paintings by Jennifer Bartlett (Text by Eisenberg). H.N. Abrams. 1994. 
• Michael John LaChiusa (2003). Little Fish. (Short Story Deborah Eisenberg). Dramatists Play Service, Inc. ISBN 978-0-8222-1973-6. 
• Francine Prose, Mark Hussey, ed. (2004). "On Mrs. Dalloway". The Mrs. Dalloway Reader. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. ISBN 978-0-15-603015-1. 

Short stories

• "Transactions in a Foreign Currency". The New Yorker 60 (49): 28–44. 21 January 1985. 
• 'Some Other, Better Otto'. Picador. June 20, 2008. ISBN 978-0-330-45800-9. 

Anthologies

• William Miller Abrahams, ed. (1995). Prize stories 1995: the O. Henry awards. Doubleday. ISBN 978-0-385-47672-0. 
• Richard Ford, ed. (2007). The New Granta Book of the American Short Story. Granta Books. ISBN 978-1-86207-847-5. 
• Laura Furman, ed. (2006). The O. Henry prize stories, Volume 2008. Anchor Books. ISBN 978-1-4000-9539-1. 

References

External links

• Deborah Eisenberg at the Internet Movie Database
• Deborah Eisenberg archive from The New York Review of Books
• Catherine Steindler (Spring 2013). "Deborah Eisenberg, The Art of Fiction No. 218". The Paris Review. 
• KCRW Bookworm Interview
• Whiting Foundation Profile

Authority control WorldCat VIAF: 79052043 LCCN: n85203662 ISNI: 0000 0000 8396 7129 GND: 121964876 SELIBR: 323300 BNF: cb120545522 (data)