Deborah Eisenberg

Early life

Eisenberg was born in Winnetka, Illinois. Her family was Jewish. She grew up in suburban Chicago, Illinois, and moved to New York City in the late 1960s.

Career

Eisenberg was an editorial assistant at The New York Review of Books in 1973. She taught at the University of Virginia from 1994 until 2011, when she accepted a teaching position at Columbia University's MFA writing program.

Writing

Eisenberg has written four collections of stories: Transactions in a Foreign Currency (1986), Under the 82nd Airborne (1992), All Around Atlantis (1997), and Twilight of the Superheroes (2006). Ben Marcus, reviewing Twilight of the Superheroes for The New York Times Book Review, called Eisenberg "one of the most important fiction writers now at work. This work is great." Her first two-story collections were republished in one volume as The Work (So Far) of Deborah Eisenberg (1997). All four short-story collections were reprinted in 2010 in The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg (2010).

She has also written a play, Pastorale, which was produced at Second Stage in New York City in 1982. Eisenberg has written for such magazines as The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The Yale Review.

Awards

Eisenberg was the recipient of the Rea Award for the Short Story in the year 2000, an award granted for significant contribution to the short story form. She has also been the recipient of such awards as a Whiting Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the O. Henry Awards.

In 2007, Eisenberg was elected into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 2009 she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. She won the 2011 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg.

Eisenberg received the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story in May 2015.

PEN controversy

In April 2015, in an exchange with American PEN’s Executive Director Suzanne Nossel published in The Intercept by Glenn Greenwald, Eisenberg criticized PEN’s decision to bestow its annual Freedom of Expression Courage Award to Charlie Hebdo instead of to "Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras." Writers Michael Moynihan, Ophelia Benson and Katha Pollitt criticized her for comparing Charlie Hebdo to the Nazi publication Der Stürmer while Jacob Siegel said she had put "dead cartoonists on trial".

Joining Eisenberg in her protest of PEN’s award ceremony were Peter Carey, Francine Prose, Teju Cole, Rachel Kushner and Taiye Selasi. In addition, 145 writers—including Junot Diaz, Lorrie Moore, Joyce Carol Oates and Michael Cunningham—signed a letter protesting PEN’s decision. While calling the murders in the Charlie Hedbo offices "sickening and tragic," the letter goes on to say, "PEN is not simply conveying support for freedom of expression but also valorizing selectively offensive material: material that intensifies the anti-Islamic, anti-Maghreb, anti-Arab sentiments already prevalent in the Western world."

Personal life

Her longtime companion is actor-writer Wallace Shawn. Eisenberg lives in New York City.