The first thought that came to my head once I finished the book is that of drifting. I felt like I had drifted through the lives of some people over the course of these 200-odd pages. Rather than having a voyeuristic view of each of their lives, I had spent time having a heart-to-heart with most of them. It doesn't make you feel like you're reading: it makes you feel like you're getting to know someone. Beautiful.

prose with a lot of muscle. favorite thing about this collection is the female protagonists who are united by the ways they minimize themselves and their occupation of the world, as if we were peering into a shallow pan. the way the other characters respond to them contradicts this masterfully. we see the bald-faced admittance of their not-enough-ness, but also the weighty impact of their just discovered orbit.

The hero of each of these stories - first-person narrated all - is really the same persona in a wide variety of settings: a high-school girl in an ambiguous relationship with a much older man, an ex-smoker who takes up exercising (oh, the 80s, when it was opt-in!), a bereaved woman vacationing somewhere in Latin America, the twenty-year old girlfriend of a drifter. This persona is somewhat eccentric and dreamy, confused by social interactions, vaguely unsatisfied and unsure of what she wants fro...

I saw Deborah Eisenberg do a reading at the 92nd Street Y before I ever read anything by her. This book of 7 short stories is effortlessly well done. each story delves deeply into the lives of disparate characters. Eisenberg captures more in a phrase then some writers do in a chapter. The stories end in media res mysterious and inexplicable and lifelike in the extreme.

Good travel books must be readable in buzzing airports crowded with frantic passengers, but also in silent lobbies, where complex meanings and articulate storytelling reward your full attention. Deborah Eisenberg's "Transactions in a Foreign Currency" delivers in both contexts. A contemporary fiction writer from New York, Eisenberg writes only short stories. These intricately carved pieces bear close inspection, but also work on a surface level, with waves of emotion flowing out of the page and

Deborah Eisenberg is a superb short story writer. She is not prolific. In her entire career, she has produced five brief collections of stories, of which this, the six stories in "Transactions In A Foreign Currency," is the first. As a writer she has a superb command of the language, and her stories are not predictable, which clearly dissatisfies some of her readers. Some stories just seem to stop on the last page, without tidy resolution. Of the stories here, "What It Was Like, Seeing Chris" (a...

I love Deborah Eisenberg and this collection did not disappoint me at all. The stories are witty, sharp, and each has something at stake for the characters. She is the master of great dialog.

Essential read. Even before she became a sharp moral voice in American fiction, vivisecting our culture, our habits, and our best intentions, Eisenberg wrote these perfect stories about imperfect people. From kids freshly arrived in NYC to those road tripping across America, from the obscenely rich to the bitterly average, Eisenberg captures what it is to be young, to be in love, and to fail at both.

More like 3.5 stars. Early Eisenberg occupies a space between Alice Munro and Raymond Carver, I think. She has Munro's amplitude and emotional depth, the sense of a story blossoming and opening out, widening as it goes along, but she also has Carver's flinty eye and attention to the mundane detail. There's a little Amy Hempel as well in some of the humor. Ultimately, though, I felt like the collection as a whole was insular and repetitive, and each story seemed like a minor variation on the same...

This is my first Eisenberg, and in many ways I am impressed. Her stories have a poignant uniqueness, and are not like any others I have read. I found the characters believable even if they were deliberately ordinary. While like other readers, I can't say the stories included anyone I liked or found especially interesting, somehow the stories all worked for me.The two which I liked best are "Rafe's Coat," which is impressively funny, and "Broken Glass," which is the only story which I can't get o...

A blight on all of you who knew and didn't bully me into reading Deborah Eisenberg earlier. Things that speak well of this collection:* I thrice picked up a pen and brought it to the paper before remembering that this is not my book* I bought a copy to keep as soon as I finished it. That should be enough, but I will temper things a bit, as I suspect this isn't quite for everyone. The first story here is called "Flotsam", and it might have been a better title for the collection as a whole. Each o...

It takes an exceptional author to make a short story work for me, and this book only confirms my thoughts. for me, the central character in all the stories in this book is unlikeable, and the stories themselves are dull, pointless and unfulfilling. It was slightly reminiscent of Armistead Maupin's tales, with it's soap-opera style, but no where near as readable or entertaining.

Another great collection of short stories. Often after finishing a book I look for a Paris Review The Art of Fiction interview with the author. Here's an excerpt from Eisenberg's: INTERVIEWER: Of course art-making isn’t therapy, but I often think artists don’t need to be quite so loath to admit some relationship between art-making and therapy.EISENBERG: Well, I understand that reluctance. If you think you’re going to be late for a movie and you walk briskly to the theater, it might be good for y...

Glad the library managed to get hold of a copy for me. This book, for the longest of times on my TBR/wishlist... didn't do it for me.Yes I laughed, some phrases were just too good ("julienned Asian unidentifiables" is a phrase I hope to use in my life), the writing, the scenes etc was/were good, but... But. The endings didn't make sense to me, didn't "do" anything for me and the writing/ characters were all distant in a way. Which, after 4-5 stories doesn't really annoy, but feeds indifference.

I'd never heard of Deborah Eisenberg before, when this book fell into my lap. But there's a quote by John Updike on the cover of this German edition, praising it. So I had a feeling I'd like these short stories. And I did. They are quite a bit like the classical "meandering melancholic intelligent Jewish New Yorker" vibe I tend to love most of the time, but from a female perspective. I definitely would like to read more from the same author.

Always nice when a lady writes like a lady but in a serious way. There was something awkward and off-kilter at the core of these stories that I really appreciated.

Most of the stories in Deborah Eisenberg's debut collection feature female main characters involved in relationships with men that are either going nowhere or bad or from bad to worse. If that scope sounds less than uplifting, or a theme that's been done and overdone, the author's formidable and nuanced writing skills make these stories stand apart in an engaging way. Eisenberg's protagonists are flawed, deeply so, but even though she writes from their perspectives, those flaws are revealed incr...

Her characters are strange in a way that makes you want to keep reading to figure them out. She crafts sentences so beautifully, the idea behind them and construction of them made me reread and reread. I look forward to reading the rest of her short stories.4.5 stars

Transactions in a Foreign Currency, Eisenberg's first collection, contains seven short stories: "Flotsam"; "What It Was Like, Seeing Chris"; "Rafe's Coat"; "A Lesson in Traveling Light"; "Days"; "Transactions in a Foreign Currency"; and "Broken Glass".

Very impressive.