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Date/Time
Date(s) - 04/16/2019
7:00 pm - 9:00 pm

Location
The Center for Fiction

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In Deborah Eisenberg’s new story collection Your Duck Is My Duck, she presents us with characters swimming or drowning in a disintegrating environment—among them, the daughter of a Hollywood actress, forced to reflect on her life with her mother when a “tell-all” memoir is published; an entitled young man who falls into an unlikely love affair with a human rights worker on a mysterious quest; a woman whose face illustrates her family’s history; a girl receiving treatment for an inexplicable psychological affliction; a politically conscious puppeteer and a struggling artist; and a young man attending the funeral of an uncle who always captivated him, but who he never even met.

Like the work of Alice Munro, Eisenberg’s stories contain a type of mysterious richness—and they demand to be reread. Reading (and rereading) these stories, readers will slowly realize that Eisenberg is revealing to us something real and true about the world we live in, about our lives. In a moment in the brilliant story “Recalculating,” an aging dancer reflects that “there was always the feeling that one would get around to being young again. And that when one was young again, life would resume the course from which it had so shockingly deviated.” The collection is full of such astonishing passages of beauty, but also truth.

Eisenberg will read from her work and talk to Alexander Chee about the process and inspiration for the stories in her new collection.