Deborah Eisenberg

Deborah Eisenberg is an American short story writer widely regarded as one of the finest practitioners of the form in contemporary American literature. Her Collected Stories won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2011. Eisenberg has published four story collections over several decades: Transactions in a Foreign Currency (1986), Under the 82nd Airborne (1992), All Around Atlantis (1997), and Twilight of the Superheroes (2006). Eisenberg's stories are known for their extraordinary intelligence, their long and elaborately subordinated sentences, and their political awareness — many of her stories engage directly with American foreign policy and its effects on ordinary people. She has received Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellowships. Eisenberg has also worked as an actress and teaches creative writing at the University of Virginia, where she has been on the faculty for many years. She is a partner of the playwright Wallace Shawn.