I didn't love all of these stories, but I truly appreciated each one. There's a lot of variety in this collection, but each piece examines themes of privilege, memory, ethics, and heartbreak in a fresh way.

These stories are a bit on the long side (lookin' at you, Merge), almost novella length, but Eisenberg's ability to construct fulfilling characters with her subtly political, weird, and quirky style is unparalleled.

Favorites: Your Duck is My Duck, Taj Mahal, and Merge. ( )

Meer dan de helft van de verhalen zijn juweeltjes. Moeilijk lezen. ( )

I'm stopping after the first story for a variety of reasons, but prime among them is that I got exactly the same feeling I do when I read a certain kind of 19th century Russian story: "You have a Point about society and I just can't quite figure out what it is." And that's fine when I'm two hundred years and ten thousand versts away, but I think I should know what a contemporary author is trying to say.

Because if you don't get her Point, "Your Duck Is My Duck" is very boring. An artist is asked to stay with a rich couple in a compound in a foreign country; there is a performance of a puppet show that turns out to be about the horrors of capitalism; she leaves and goes her own way, and when she runs into the puppeteer later, he's tuned the anti-capitalism down and the couple's compound and marriage has fallen apart. She's a kind of Nick Carraway -- but Nick had a character, and the artist is a purely blank slate.

There was also a vague cast of the fantastic, I thought -- the sleeping medication she's given has a very strong effect; something about the compound and the country, maybe how non-specific it was, felt as though it wasn't in our world. But if it waswhy.

And the tone felt off the whole time -- her prose is lovely and precise, but there was too much remove for this story: it felt too poised and distant. I never got the sense that the artist cared about anything.

And again, I just don't get it. Which is often a failure of the reader, but here I do feel that Eisenberg is being a little too oblique.

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. ( )

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. ( )