Rejoice! A New Eisenberg Collection Appears

Deborah Eisenberg’s new story collection, Twilight of the Superheroes, gets a rave review in today’s Christian Science Monitor. The title story is about four young people who sublet an apartment in New York with a clear view of the World Trade Center, before the attacks.

“When they moved in, it probably was the best view on the planet. Then, one morning, out of the clear blue sky, it became, for a while, probably the worst.”

The story is told in fragments from the points of view of Nathaniel, who is working on a comic book called Passivityman, and his Uncle Lucien, who got Nathaniel and his friends the apartment.

“The good-hearted, casually wasteful festival was over…. For a long miserable while, in fact, the city looked like a school play about war profiteering,” Lucien thinks about New York in the months following the tragedy.

Then he decides that, no, it’s more as if everyone’s acting as if they’re in a badly written propaganda film.

The collection also includes the story “Some Other, Better Otto” which was also anthologized in Best American Short Stories 2004, edited by Lorrie Moore.