“Nathaniel Recalls the Miracle” - A Short Story by Deborah Eisenberg- from her collection Twilight of the Superheroes- 2006

Buried in Print - Mavis Gallant Project

“You see, if history has anything to teach us, it’s that—despite all our efforts, despite our best (or worst) intentions, despite our touchingly indestructible faith in our 
own foresight—we poor humans cannot actually think 
ahead; there are just too many variables. And so, when it comes down to it, it always turns out that no one is in charge of the things that really matter.”  - from “Nathaniel Recalls the Miracle” by Deborah Eisenberg

“Nathaniel Recalls the Miracle” is the lead story in Deborah Eisenberg’s collection of short stories, Twilight of the Superheroes.  (This story can be read in a Kindle sample along with a few others.)   

The Collected Short Stories of Deborah Eisenberg (2010) has 96 stories.  I am quite seriously contemplating a read through of this volume, at the minimum rate of two a month, posting on each.  In this I have been inspired by the 


reading and posting on each of the 200 or so short stories of Mavis Gallant of Buried in Print (link above).  This project would take me from two to four years so it is also a gesture of optimism.  Anyway more on this idea latter. 

As “Nathaniel Recalls the Miracle” opens a man is in his apartment in New York City.  He is contemplating what he will tell his not yet born grandchild about what happened to the computers of the world when the calendar turned to the first day of 2000.  There was a wide spread paranoia that the computers of the world would all crash creating anarchy.  There were visions of planes falling from the sky, money in bank accounts just vanishing, etc.  Nathaniel wonders how he will explain to his hypothetical grandchildren that it all came to nothing.  He tries to envision the world in which such a conversation will occur and cannot.

I really enjoyed this brief fiction, reading time under five minutes.  

Mel u

"Your Duck is My Duck" by Deborah Eisenberg (from 2013 O. Henry Prize Stories)

Author Bio 

Over the past three decades, Deborah Eisenberg has produced four short-story collections:Transactions in a Foreign Currency (1986), Under the 82nd Airborne (1992), All Around Atlantis (1997), and Twilight of the Superheroes (2006). She has also written a play,Pastorale (1982), a monograph on the artist Jennifer Bartlett (1994), and criticism, much of it for The New York Review of Books. Her preeminence as a short-story writer has been recognized by countless critics and a host of awards, including a DAAD residency, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature, many O. Henry prizes, the pen/Faulkner Award for Fiction, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and a MacArthur “genius grant.”

The yearly anthology of the O. Henry Prize Stories is one of the most important short story collections of the year.  The requirement for consideration is that your work must have been published in an American or Canadian publication.  I really like the way the collections are done and the secondary articles in which the judges talk about their favorite short stories.  

"My Duck is Your Duck" by Deborah Eisenberg is the lead story in the collection.  It was my first exposure to her work and I will, hopefully be reading more of her work soon. The central character, a woman, is a struggling painter.  She tells the story and she is interesting, perceptive,and intelligent.  I don't want to tell much of the plot.  She is invited to come stay at the island retreat of a hyper-wealthy family that admires her work.  Everything about the story is intriguing.  It is about a lot of things.  The nature of art, the exploitive nature of the rich, the decay of many local cultures caused by intrusions, big business and much more.  There is a puppet show master also staying there