Eisenberg was an editorial assistant at
The New York Review of Books in 1973. She taught at the
University of Virginia from 1994 until 2011, when she accepted a teaching position at
Columbia University's MFA writing program.
Writing Eisenberg has written five collections of stories:
Transactions in a Foreign Currency (1986),
Under the 82nd Airborne (1992),
All Around Atlantis (1997),
Twilight of the Superheroes (2006), and
Your Duck Is My Duck (2018).
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."
Michiko Kakutani, reviewing the same collection in
The New York Times, wrote that Eisenberg has a "playwright's ear for dialogue and a journalistic eye for the askew detail". Her first two story collections were republished in one volume as
The Work (So Far) of Deborah Eisenberg (1997). Her first four collections were subsequently reprinted in
The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg (2010). Eisenberg's later books include
Your Duck Is My Duck (2018), a story collection that continues her exploration of contemporary relationships and moral complexity. Eisenberg has also written a play,
Pastorale, which was produced at
Second Stage in New York City in 1982. She has written for such magazines as
The New York Review of Books,
The New Yorker, and
The Yale Review.
Awards Eisenberg received the
Rea Award for the Short Story in 2000, an award granted for significant contribution to the short story form. She has also received a
Whiting Award and a
Guggenheim Fellowship, both in 1987; and six
O. Henry Awards, in 1986, 1995, 1997, 2002, 2006, and 2013. In 2007, Eisenberg was elected into the
American Academy of Arts and Letters, She won the 2011
PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for
The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg. Eisenberg received the
PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story in May 2015.
Your Duck Is My Duck was one of three finalists for
The Story Prize for the year 2018.
PEN award criticism In April 2015, in an exchange with
PEN America's Executive Director
Suzanne Nossel published in
The Intercept by
Glenn Greenwald, Eisenberg criticized PEN's decision to bestow its annual Freedom of Expression Courage Award to
Charlie Hebdo, calling the choice "an opportunistic exploitation of the horrible murders in Paris to justify and glorify offensive material expressing
Islamophobic and nationalistic sentiments already widely shared in the Western world." In addition, 145 writers—including
Junot Díaz,
Lorrie Moore,
Joyce Carol Oates and
Michael Cunningham—signed a letter protesting PEN's decision. ==Personal life==