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Transactions in a Foreign Currency
Seven stories tell of a tragic love affair, a teenager's involvement with an older man, a struggle to quit smoking, and a woman who discovers she is in love with an old friend
214 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1986
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About the author
Deborah Eisenberg
34Ìýbooks291ÌýfollowersBorn in Chicago, Eisenberg moved to New York City in the 1960's where she has lived ever since. She also teaches at the University of Virginia. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Yale Review, Vanity Fair, and Tin House. She has won the Rea Award for the Short Story, a Whiting Writer's Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and three O. Henry Awards.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 52 reviews
January 9, 2024
It’s extraordinary what you find out if you idly google someone. I didn’t know anything about Deborah Eisenberg so I did just that and was most surprised to find that this cool clear creator of these seven sedulous studies of self-sabotaging, psychological faultlines and minor life disasters is married to none other than Mr Hall, the wry and much put-upon teacher in Clueless
I liked these short stories but only loved one, “Rafe’s Coat� � the one about the very brittle 33 year old arts foundation board member who’s crushing badly on her friend Rafe whose latest girlfriend is in a soap opera called This Brief Candle. She has a withering view of humanity. On the subject of divorce, for instance :
John and I parceled out our holdings and made our adieus and slogged through whatever contractual and emotional dreariness was necessitated by going on with life.
(Together since the early 70s)
I liked these short stories but only loved one, “Rafe’s Coat� � the one about the very brittle 33 year old arts foundation board member who’s crushing badly on her friend Rafe whose latest girlfriend is in a soap opera called This Brief Candle. She has a withering view of humanity. On the subject of divorce, for instance :
John and I parceled out our holdings and made our adieus and slogged through whatever contractual and emotional dreariness was necessitated by going on with life.
(Together since the early 70s)
January 1, 2020
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.
December 12, 2023
I am actually reading The Collected Stories by Deborah Eisenberg, which consists of her first four published short story collections (a fifth has since been published). The four collections in The Collected Stories are not broken apart and reorganized in any way as some authors or publishers do, so in reading the first section of The Collected Stories I have read Eisenberg’s first published collection and can review it. I am so happy I can do this because now I do not have to wait until I have read all 992 pages of The Collected Stories before I tell you how absolutely wonderful the stories in the first collection were. I have never before read any of Deborah Eisenberg’s stories, so being faced with this behemoth of a collection I was hoping the stories would be good. Now I can’t wait to get on to the next one.
All of the stories are written in the 1st person, and the narrator is never identified by name. In two of the stories a young woman is in a relationship with an older man. The two stories are very different but in each case the woman ultimately recognizes that the relationship was not in her best interests. In Broken Glass the mother of a 34-year-old woman has died after an illness that lasted 20 years. The narrator is having to deal with her mother’s death and with what her life will look like in the future. In all of these stories the narrator was a young woman ranging in age from 17 to 34, but the stories are told in such a personal, intimate manner that I felt I could relate to the narrators even though they were so very different from me. I will be very interested to see if the narration style remains the same for future stories or changes.
While I have rated this collection 5 stars, I don’t think I have ever rated 5 stars every story in a collection. That is true here as well. Of the seven stories in the collection, I rated two stories 5 stars, four stories 4 stars and one story 3 stars. Eisenberg’s stories average around 40 pages, so longer than the average length I come across in a lot of collections. I do know that 992 pages of Eisenberg’s stories are now looking like a gift.
All of the stories are written in the 1st person, and the narrator is never identified by name. In two of the stories a young woman is in a relationship with an older man. The two stories are very different but in each case the woman ultimately recognizes that the relationship was not in her best interests. In Broken Glass the mother of a 34-year-old woman has died after an illness that lasted 20 years. The narrator is having to deal with her mother’s death and with what her life will look like in the future. In all of these stories the narrator was a young woman ranging in age from 17 to 34, but the stories are told in such a personal, intimate manner that I felt I could relate to the narrators even though they were so very different from me. I will be very interested to see if the narration style remains the same for future stories or changes.
While I have rated this collection 5 stars, I don’t think I have ever rated 5 stars every story in a collection. That is true here as well. Of the seven stories in the collection, I rated two stories 5 stars, four stories 4 stars and one story 3 stars. Eisenberg’s stories average around 40 pages, so longer than the average length I come across in a lot of collections. I do know that 992 pages of Eisenberg’s stories are now looking like a gift.
October 13, 2015
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 of the characters in these seven stories are acted upon, buffeted about by circumstances out of their control and out of their desire to control. They seem to drift about the periphery of their own lives, and their passivity is sure to irritate some readers as the resulting stories are often light on plot and heavy on character development.
For me though, this stuff is gold. Eisenberg does an especially good job with openings, with closings, and with moments where the past intrudes on the present, often freezing characters in their tracks. Here, for example, is the first paragraph of the title story:
I had lit a fire in my fireplace, and I'd poured out two coffees and two brandies, and I was settling down on the sofa next to a man who had taken me out to dinner when Ivan called after more than six months. I turned with the receiver to the wall as I absorbed the fact of Ivan's voice, and when I glanced back at the man on the sofa, he seemed like a scrap of paper, or the handle from a broken cup, or a single rubber band--a thing that has become dislodged from its rightful place and intrudes on one's consciousness two or three or many times before one understands that it is just a thing best thrown away."
Two.Damn.Sentences. And she accomplishes more than many do in pages. It's perhaps her best trick, her mastery of compression and decompression. Pages will pass in which characters float and flit about ineffectually, and then in a jewel-like bit of prose the world and more will happen in a page or less.
Mark me down as a person now hellbent on reading (with pen in hand, in my own copies) every word Deborah Eisenberg has ever written. Twice. At least twice.
* 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 of the characters in these seven stories are acted upon, buffeted about by circumstances out of their control and out of their desire to control. They seem to drift about the periphery of their own lives, and their passivity is sure to irritate some readers as the resulting stories are often light on plot and heavy on character development.
For me though, this stuff is gold. Eisenberg does an especially good job with openings, with closings, and with moments where the past intrudes on the present, often freezing characters in their tracks. Here, for example, is the first paragraph of the title story:
I had lit a fire in my fireplace, and I'd poured out two coffees and two brandies, and I was settling down on the sofa next to a man who had taken me out to dinner when Ivan called after more than six months. I turned with the receiver to the wall as I absorbed the fact of Ivan's voice, and when I glanced back at the man on the sofa, he seemed like a scrap of paper, or the handle from a broken cup, or a single rubber band--a thing that has become dislodged from its rightful place and intrudes on one's consciousness two or three or many times before one understands that it is just a thing best thrown away."
Two.Damn.Sentences. And she accomplishes more than many do in pages. It's perhaps her best trick, her mastery of compression and decompression. Pages will pass in which characters float and flit about ineffectually, and then in a jewel-like bit of prose the world and more will happen in a page or less.
Mark me down as a person now hellbent on reading (with pen in hand, in my own copies) every word Deborah Eisenberg has ever written. Twice. At least twice.
August 5, 2022
“When I was a kid, I used to wonder (I bet everyone did) whether there was somebody somewhere on the earth, or even in the universe, or ever had been in all of time, who had had exactly the same experience that I was having at that moment, and I hoped so badly that there was. But I realized then that that could never occur, because every moment is all the things that have happened before and all the things that are going to happen, and every moment is just the way all those things look at one point on their way along a line. And I thought how maybe once there was, say, a princess who lost her mother’s ring in a forest, and how in some other galaxy a strange creature might fall, screaming, on the shore of a red lake, and how right that second there could be a man standing at a window overlooking a busy street, aiming a loaded revolver, but how it was just me, there, after Chris, staring at that turtle in the fourth-grade room and wondering if it would die before I stopped being able to see it.� � “What it Was Like, Seeing Chris�
January 17, 2019
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 from life. There is an odd and jarring discontinuity in her reflections sometimes, somewhat DeLilloesque, although infinitely warmer. I bundled underneath its warm blanket, content if not always clued-in. Eisenberg's characters don't quite understand the world they operate in. They are naive and insecure. But like all of us, they muddle along, if not finding happiness then at least hinting at its future possibility.
Read
August 23, 2017Another 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:
I love it.
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 you, but that’s not why you’re walking briskly. Writing does change you, and of course it feels good to do things, so you could say writing is de facto therapeutic. But really, one writes to write.
I love it.
July 31, 2018
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.
Read
October 11, 2008Always 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.
January 23, 2022
Transactions in a Foreign Currency, Eisenberg's first collection, contains seven short stories: ""; ""; "Rafe's Coat"; "A Lesson in Traveling Light"; "Days"; ""; and "".
December 5, 2009
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 through your mind. She narrates her stories with a conversationalist's sense of flow and a true cynic's eye for dark humor. This collection seems to focus on pulling apart tensions, exploring the construction of our social and internal worlds like one might gaze at the surface of a stretched piece of taffy.
If you're traveling somewhere in this holiday season, I highly recommend picking this collection up for the flight.
If you're traveling somewhere in this holiday season, I highly recommend picking this collection up for the flight.
May 5, 2017
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.
September 26, 2012
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.
June 28, 2015
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.
February 23, 2024
This collection of seven short stories by was published in 1986, so it was contemporary for its time. This kind of reading is always fascinating to me. A quote from a review in Time perfectly sums up this feeling:
An eon from now, literary anthropologists will be able to reconstruct a state of mind, circa 1986, from the bones and shards of this distinctive collection."
Each of the stand-alone stories are in the first-person narrative, all women ranging from a teenager to mid-30s, so at times I felt it was the same person telling the story which made me think there were some of the author's own personal experiences entwined with the storytelling. I read in an author interview that had quit smoking when she was thirty. In the short story, "Days," the narrator begins with:
"I had never known what I was like until I stopped smoking, by which time there was hell to pay for it.
This story was raw and unflinching, and I think could only have been written by someone who has been through this experience.
The narrators in this collection seem to in a state of insecurity and self-doubt but searching for a sense of self by the story's end. I was curious to know the trajectory of their lives after I finished each story.
I am grateful to Albert, one of my literary friends here on Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ because I had never even heard of until his review of this collection popped up on my GR feed. I was surprised none of author's works have appeared on it before. This is her first published collection. I am very interested to see if her writing style has changed in some of her later collections.
An eon from now, literary anthropologists will be able to reconstruct a state of mind, circa 1986, from the bones and shards of this distinctive collection."
Each of the stand-alone stories are in the first-person narrative, all women ranging from a teenager to mid-30s, so at times I felt it was the same person telling the story which made me think there were some of the author's own personal experiences entwined with the storytelling. I read in an author interview that had quit smoking when she was thirty. In the short story, "Days," the narrator begins with:
"I had never known what I was like until I stopped smoking, by which time there was hell to pay for it.
This story was raw and unflinching, and I think could only have been written by someone who has been through this experience.
The narrators in this collection seem to in a state of insecurity and self-doubt but searching for a sense of self by the story's end. I was curious to know the trajectory of their lives after I finished each story.
I am grateful to Albert, one of my literary friends here on Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ because I had never even heard of until his review of this collection popped up on my GR feed. I was surprised none of author's works have appeared on it before. This is her first published collection. I am very interested to see if her writing style has changed in some of her later collections.
June 22, 2017
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 out of my head.
But somehow I kept resisting returning to the book, and aside from the two stories I mentioned above, I don't remember the others well a few days later, despite having taken notes.
Still, there is artistry here and I am enthusiastic about reading more by Eisenberg. The writing is crisp and never bland or trite, and there is something unexpected about what happens in each story which propels one forward somehow.
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 out of my head.
But somehow I kept resisting returning to the book, and aside from the two stories I mentioned above, I don't remember the others well a few days later, despite having taken notes.
Still, there is artistry here and I am enthusiastic about reading more by Eisenberg. The writing is crisp and never bland or trite, and there is something unexpected about what happens in each story which propels one forward somehow.
June 10, 2021
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 incrementally and indirectly, in such a manner that the reader, instead of being repelled, can grow to share the author's understanding of and compassion for them. These fictional lives have real world qualities in that conflicts are often left unresolved and characters unredeemed, and yet when those characters reach turning points, they change direction, perhaps not toward promise but in the direction of gambles where bettors who stay in the game may stake their hopes.
August 7, 2019
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 story. In this collection, at least, she doesn't yet have the range of the three masters previously mentioned.
July 5, 2021
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. And once to the point of indifference, there's no slogging on for more than 1-2 stories (on willpower). Unfinished.
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. And once to the point of indifference, there's no slogging on for more than 1-2 stories (on willpower). Unfinished.
December 29, 2018
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" (about a young woman finding herself the center of older male attention for the first time) and "Rafe's Coat" (a gently humorous satire about New Yorkers) are memorable, but I liked the whole book - probably, I think, because it was my first exposure to Eisenberg. One down, four to go! Recommended.
December 31, 2017
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.
October 7, 2023
this grew on me. at first i enjoyed the unsure characters, astute observations & kind of sweetness, but it didn't especially stir me. i wanted more ambitious stories and emotions
but i do see how that maybe wasn't the point. it was getting at something and it was kind of nice that it didn't totally arrive. the teasing out of fine distinctions in moods and impulses and the beautiful and surprising descriptions was enough
reminded me that there's a lot to be said for writing an atmosphere
but i do see how that maybe wasn't the point. it was getting at something and it was kind of nice that it didn't totally arrive. the teasing out of fine distinctions in moods and impulses and the beautiful and surprising descriptions was enough
reminded me that there's a lot to be said for writing an atmosphere
November 19, 2018
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.
December 21, 2018
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
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
December 5, 2023
My second Deborah Eisenberg book and this was easier than the first, though I still have the feeling that I am missing most of what the stories are about.
For me these stories are the best:
Rafe’s Coat
A Lesson in Traveling Light
Transactions in a Foreign Currency
For me these stories are the best:
Rafe’s Coat
A Lesson in Traveling Light
Transactions in a Foreign Currency
September 19, 2024
[3.5] As I read these rather melancholy stories mostly set in NYC, I admired Eisenberg's dialogue, wit and skill. Several days after finishing, I am having trouble recalling any of them except Days which I loved - about a woman who quits smoking and joins the YMCA.
November 3, 2018
Very impressive.
Read
May 23, 2023not for me DNF
July 12, 2023
Stories that transport you to a different time and place. Skillfully crafted writing with not a word wasted. A writer gifted beyond measure.
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