The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg

Front to back, the pattern repeats: women mistreated by self-absorbed men, story after story, in a Manhattan-centric, moneyed world some readers find insular rather than universal. The talky, dialogue-heavy register draws its own complaint, one reader dismissing entire stretches as “whinier, less interesting versions of My Dinner with Andre.” At close to a thousand pages, another calls the “sheer size of the book” itself overwhelming, and a third compares long passages to “sitting at dinner with adults' inane chit-chat.” The later South American-set stories and the lesser companions to Twilight of the Superheroes get singled out as weaker than her earlier work, and endings that refuse resolution frustrate readers who want a story to actually land.