Tilight of the Superheroes Stories [Paperback]

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 for his schizophrenic sister, Eisenberg brilliantly illustrates the lives of people rubbed raw by what the fates have sent them (Vanity Fair).

Deborah Eisenbergis the author of four previous collections of stories. The recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award, a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Rea Award for the Short Story, she lives in New York City.

There aren't many contemporary novels as shudderingly intimate and mordantly funny as Eisenberg's best stories. Ben Marcus, The New York Times Book Review

A masterly collection . . . Instead of forcing her characters' stories into neat, arbitrary, preordained shapes, Deborah Eisenberg allows them to grow organically into oddly shaped, asymmetrical narratives--narratives that possess all the surprising twists and dismaying turns of real life. Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

Eisenberg's filament-thin weavings of desire, obligation, and missed opportunities remind one strongly of Henry James. . . . Eisenberg is a master of condensation and reconstruction, making beautiful murals from broken glass. O, The Oprah Magazine

Ambitious and resonant . . . Whether the subjects be lovely young girls grown old or waning superpowers, Eisenberg makes masterful short work out of marking their decline and fall. NPR's Fresh Air

The deepest pleasure in Ms. Eisenberg's stories is their vertiginous unpredictability, like obstacle courses the author jumps and rolls and shilé