Deborah Eisenberg's stories have an element of artificiality which make them irritating to read but beautiful to think about afterward Her stories are gorgeous, little jewels, with alluring characters, memorable metaphors and unconventional choices of adjectives & nouns. It's worth noting that among her gifts, Eisenberg has a knack for titles - they're thought provoking and ambiguous, and as inherent a part of the writing as the content itself. The synthetic quality of her writing does make me c...

Continue to really enjoy Eisenberg. Esoteric and evocative at the same time and a master of metaphor and description. Highlights for me here were the titular story, “The Custodians,” and “Holy Week.”

my first reading of this author and I found the stories not quite as interesting as I had hoped after reading a rave review of her newest work.

Uneven. These are stories in which I can read about more unattractive aspects of myself - aging yuppie with adult offspring and ties to NYC, first-world traveler in Latin America, etc. I really liked some of the stories, especially the title story as well as A Cautionary Tale, which reminded me a lot of my visit to Guatemala about a decade ago. Others didn't work for me, like Holy week and In the Station. Worth borrowing and reading some of the stories.

Fails in some ways to build upon the promise of TIAFC. Variety seems to come from the wrong places, less exciting, a bit repetitive. Still quality writing but didn’t blow my mind like the first collection.

Multi-layered short stories.

Disappointing. What was consistent about this book is I disliked almost all the stories and absolutely disliked just about everyone in them. Then, to my surprise, I loved the fifth one (of six): "Holy week."Some of the writing is good, except for "In the Station" which was startlingly inept, littered with purple prose like "Poison squirted into her veins."A lot of sad and sour people and in all the stories a lack of human connection. It took me a week to read this relatively short book because I...

These stories are pretty good, and people can relate to them. Most of us have moved to New York City at some point in our lives, and a good portion have confronted ourselves through encounters with dusty, silent, indigenous people/ruthless right-wing death squads in vaguely Nicaraguan-type countries. Right?Actually, I eventually got bored with these stories. The first three were really good, the fourth was enjoyable, but after that my gnat-like attention started to wane. "The Custodian" was so b...

Goddamn it!This is my goddman third Eisenberg book. There’s only four! God damn it! This is what I get, this is what an epicurean lifestyle produces. Heed my example, people, I’ve got a long life to live with only one more Eisenberg book left. What kind of life could I possibly hope to have? Heed my folly. What’s great about Deb’s writing is that everything is airborne. All her adjective’s (as ornate as the King’s piesafe) are buoyant. They soar, stream, alight, bound, waft, you name any kind of...

What is it with "stories" from the 90s that there is little or no story? Just damaged characters in weird situations.

Hard to write honest and fair review, because short stories are not really my preference. These left me feeling empty and sad. Desperate, lonely people.

The writing bounces from mood to mood, sometimes within sentences, but never leaves the reader behind. Many have the qualities of a play, with dialog carrying the plot, character development, sometimes even settings. The author handles a number of different voices - Latin American, British, eastern European, and a range of American women, who really are her best creations. "Holy Week" the most experimental, consists of supposed "notes" by a travel writer, but the heart of the story is his much

A collection of stories about women floundering, searching, trying to settle themselves but feeling increasingly bewildered and thrown off balance by a world of disorder, of ridiculous systems both social and industrial, full of morally bankrupt people. They feel conned by life’s little scams, like there’s something others have been able to latch onto that they’re missing. The stories run long, at around 40 pages, so they’re a little more comprehensive, you have more time. Eisenberg is a New Yor...

An exceptional collection of short stories by one of the finest short story writers I have ever read. I saw Eisenberg read from her latest collection of stories at the 92nd street Y toward the end of the year, I was at the reading to hear Gary Shteyngart but based on the reading I decided to read some of Eisenberg's stories. This book Under the 82nd Airborne was written in the early 1990's it consists of 7 stories set in a variety of locations and all of them are relatively lengthy. I have decid...

Keeps you at an arm's length. Don't often have the experience with fiction where it feels this gossipy; like there's information I don't need, but am frustrated I can't get. Eisenberg is damn talented–I enjoyed and appreciated every story–but I had trouble accessing them fully, emotionally.

The characters of Airborne suffer repercussions of ignorance. At an individual level, this ignorance (in the young, more kindly called naivete) can be as small in scope as personal unease; Eisenberg, however, conveys the gravity of adolescent pain with the skill of the best young adult fiction authors. At its worst, this ignorance is global, and the repercussions both political and personal can include death -- but Eisenberg is sneaky, only hinting at devastation of this magnitude in the backgro...

Eisenberg's second collection of short stories, the six called "Under the 82nd Airborne," are a welcome addition to her work, though they can seem somewhat less focused than those in her first collection. In addition, her stories sometimes exhibit a certain "lack of place" - it isn't exactly clear where they transpire. Reflecting the time she and her husband, the playwright and actor Wallace Shawn ("My Dinner with Andre"), spent in South America, two of the stories ("Under the 82nd Airborne" and...

***3.5 stars***

I was intrigued by Deborah Eisenberg by reading a piece in Harper’s magazine last year that discussed her new book,Twilight of the Superheroes, as well as her past work: All Around Atlantis, Under the 82nd Airborne, Transactions in a Foreign Currency. I happened to stumble across the now out-of-print collection Under the 82nd Airborne in an used book store and have become one of the converted. She is very adept at capturing character types as well as dialogue. Two of the stories, the title story...

Others have called this collection "hit or miss" and I wholeheartedly agree. I am curious which are which for each of us, so I'm just gonna say that two in the middle, "The Robbery" and, even more so "Presents" not only disappointed me, but in the latter case, left me actually angry. Not over the subject matter, nor anything else that was actually intended to raise nettles. I was angry with Ms. Eisenberg for putting such an obtuse, nonsensical end to it that clearly went completely over my head....