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Outstanding
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Publishers Weekly
A terrific addition to the oeuvre of one of America's finest and most deeply empathetic short story writers.
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Outstanding
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Salon Ben Cosgrove
As with all of Eisenberg's fiction, these stories show us who we are, and what we're capable of. They chronicle, and edify, our time.
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Outstanding
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San Francisco Chronicle Alan Cheuse
These are special stories, with their new effects, their modulations of colors and light -- you have to listen carefully, but when you do, they sound like ethereal chamber music.
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Outstanding
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The New York Times Book Review Ben Marcus
In some futuristic world, perhaps people will be fitted with devices that can penetrate their defenses, divining and broadcasting their deepest thoughts and fears. Until then, Eisenberg has given us these remarkable stories, machines of perfect revelation deftly constructed by a contemporary master.
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Outstanding
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Washington Post Lisa Zeidner
Twilight of the Superheroes... confirms her talent for fiction that, like Chekhov's, insinuates you right into the characters' gnarled hearts, by methods so subtle and slippery that you're not sure where you are or how you got there.
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Outstanding
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New York Observer Regina Marler
Despite the somber theme, these are fearless, fierce, light-bearing stories, offered in defense of what still matters.
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Outstanding
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Atlantic Monthly Mona Simpson
The six stories here feel especially new, perhaps because they didn’t appear in large-circulation magazines (what’s up over there at The New Yorker?). They are [Eisenberg's] most ambitious and beautiful works to date.
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Outstanding
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New York Review Of Books Cathleen Schine
Even her treatment of the terrorist attacks of September 11, a subject far too raw for most writers to handle without self-important vulgarity, is done with such allusive reserve that the immensity of the tragedy is allowed to take its own true shape beyond the edges of the page. This book is without doubt Eisenberg's best.
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Favorable
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The Guardian Todd McEwen
One of the fascinations of Eisenberg's prose is figuring out which hole in the fence she will peer through; like a kind physician, she urges her characters, and us, to focus on our existences. Every time you can depend upon her to put our dilemmas to us in stories that are modest, moral, inventive and afraid. They will stick to your ribs.
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Favorable
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London Review Of Books Tessa Hadley
Wherever Eisenberg turns her attention she searches out the conscientious unease beneath surface attention, and applies herself to the ways the large outlines of history and power relations manifest themselves in the detail of daily lives.
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Favorable
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Village Voice Jessica Winter
Much happens in Eisenberg's stories, but often they don't build toward a climax or cathartic revelation. Rather, they map and dig the terrain covered in the deliberations of a sleepless night, or trace the nubs and textures of a single, branching thought, one that tries to entwine and subdue an invincible question: How did I get here?
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Favorable
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Kirkus Reviews
Not quite equal to Eisenberg's All Around Atlantis (1997), but she's still the closest thing there is to an American Alice Munro. And this is one fine source for Woody Allen to mine for his next New York movie.
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Favorable
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Los Angeles Times Judith Lewis
Reading [Eisenberg] makes you wish, as you study the family in front of you in the grocery line, that you could see their thoughts rendered as one of Eisenberg's stunning inner monologues. [29 Jan 2006]
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Favorable
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The New York Times Michiko Kakutani
Instead of forcing her characters' stories into neat, arbitrary, preordained shapes, she allows them to grow organically into oddly shaped, asymmetrical narratives -- narratives that possess all the surprising twists and dismaying turns of real life.
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Favorable
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Bookslut Alexa
One can only hope that Eisenberg... will give us more female characters who have moral and emotional dilemmas that make them as torn and complex as the rest of us.
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Favorable
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Boston Globe Gail Caldwell
[Eisenberg's] stories possess all the steely beauty of a knife wrapped in velvet.
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Favorable
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Christian Science Monitor Yvonne Zipp
"Like It or Not" aside, in just a handful of tales Eisenberg offers enough insight and intelligent observation to amply justify her reputation as the American Alice Munro.
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Mixed
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Entertainment Weekly Jennifer Reese
Like others who have tackled 9/11, Eisenberg hasn't figured out how to translate the enormous event into human-scale fiction.
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