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 Roman holiday of a schoolteacher running away from the news of her ex-husband's life-threatening illness, and her unlikely guide, a titled art scout in desperate revolt against his circumstances and aging; to the too painful love of a brother for his schizophrenic sister, whose tragic life embitters him to the very idea of family, Eisenberg evokes, in brooding passionate and brilliant prose, a brutally honest portrait of our lives today, showing us truths which are both poetic and deeply political. 'Like Alice Munro, virtually her only equal in the field, Deborah Eisenberg seems incapable of writing a bad short story . . . Eisenberg's writing at times approaches the beauty of a line of poetry. She manipulates her readers with a master's blend of humor and poignancy. Her stories are wondrous' San Francisco Chronicle

Deborah Eisenberg's daring and original fiction has placed her among the small group of contemporary writers who are shaping the future direction of the genre. Her deeply etched and mysterious stories focus on individuals grappling with the dislocations, ironies, and compromises levied by ordinary reality and the vivid, troubling worlds her characters inhabit. In "The Girl Who Left Her Sock on the Floor", a messenger arrives to conduct a boarding-school girl into an utterly unexpected future; in "Across the Lake", a well-meaning college student on summer vacation finds that he is a voyeur -- and possibly worse -- at a guerrilla war he almost failed to notice; in "Mermaids", some suburban schoolchildren try to navigate through the "acceptable level" of adult pollution around them; in "Someone to Talk To", an aging not-quite prodigy finds himself giving a concert in a banana republic. With lyrical and gleaming prose, Eisenberg pries open daily life to explore the hidden mechanisms of human behavior.