Your Duck Is My Duck: Stories

Life takes unusual shape in Deborah Eisenberg’s newest stories. In “Your Duck Is My Duck,” a volatile couple invite an artist to take up residence in their home, where she meets a puppeteer and finds her life altered in ways she couldn’t have expected. In “Taj Mahal,” a group of old friends gathers to discuss the truths and untruths in a book that purports to reveal their lives. In “Merge,” an aimless young man seeks odd jobs after a falling-out with his wealthy father and meets two women who have things to teach them—if only he could understand.

In these and other stories, Eisenberg resists easy descriptions and straightforward storylines, and the moments of obfuscation or outright confusion heighten the sense of life being difficult to pin down in the best of circumstances. There are no pure narratives, and nothing is black and white. Relationships are redefined, beauty is questioned, language is dissected–these ideas appear again and again throughout these tales. These are stories to be savored and reread, teased apart like dense tapestries.