She wants her cup of stars.

Here's my reading list from this year, linked to reviews when I've written them.

Deborah Eisenberg was one of the writers I tried most fervently to emulate when I was younger. When I was eighteen I read an article in Harpers' by Francine Prose, about the set of expectations readers bring to female writers of fiction. Prose mentioned a number of contemporary women who write savage, intelligent, complex fiction (as opposed to the aching domestic novels that Prose claims many people think of when the phrase "woman writer" enters a conversation). Two of those writers, Mary Gaitskill and Deborah Eisenberg, have been incredibly important to me over the years in different ways.

My emulations were pretty feeble, honestly. This is because Eisenberg writes some of the most complicated short stories I have ever read. They're long, they're densely layered, and plot typically fades into the background of something more nuanced. One of the blurbs on the back of her newest book, Twilight of the Superheroes, says this: "Ms. Eisenberg writes big, risky, quick but thickly textured fiction that has the energy, breadth, and social imagination we associate with large seriocomic novels." A pompous way to say it, but it's true. Her short fiction is as ambitious, as rich, as, say, Franzen's Corrections or Moody's Ice Storm. In my opinion, this is absolutely no exaggeration.

Her stories don't work the same way most short stories do; for one thing they're incredibly long, some almost sixty pages. This means you can't consider the story a flirtation, a brief affair. Most short stories are appealing because you can read them in a sitting, while waiting for the bus or on a lunch break or what have you. You really have to clear your schedule for Eisenberg's (and it's worth it). There's never some easy to swallow "epiphany" at the end; the fiction is much more interested in experience than some kind of moral lesson or unveiling or pat bow-tied ending. The stories in Twilight of the Superheroes come from different angles: one charts the internal territory of a man whose love for his schizophrenic sister contorts his feelings about family in general. In another, a group of young New Yorkers are about to lose their sublet (an extravagent penthouse that, only a few years earlier, became an image of hell looming directly over the Twin Towers). The story explores the diminishments of maturity, the struggle of youth meeting a world that doesn't match expectations. In "Window," a young woman recalls her intense relationship with a gun-peddler who lived in a cabin, both the intense glittering highs of their relationship, and the brutal culmination.

Describing the subject matter seems to deny her work justice. At heart, what works in an Eisenberg story is the way the internal world collides with the external. It's sometimes funny and sometimes horrible and sometimes very sad. Innocents are abroad in her stories, and not-so-innocents as well. We don't watch her characters or follow them so much as sink directly into them, like it or not.

She's a hard damn person to do a brief critique on. If you're a fan of Lorrie Moore, Alice Munro, or Jennifer Egan, some of the same things that I love in all those writers are things I love here. But then too there's something just intensely specific about Eisenberg, some idiosyncracy that's hard to touch upon but that makes her fiction incandescent.

Oh, Ladies of Grace Adieu...you had me at Susanna Clarke, you really did. You didn't have to throw in Charles Vess to make me love you.

But I'm glad you did. 

Is it weird that I want to hug a book?

Reason #576 you wish you lived in Portland (or are glad you live in Portland): Powells readings.

Tonight we went and heard Kelly Link. She read a new-ish piece about an undead girlfriend. I was glad hplovescats went, since when I think "undead girlfriend" I think "my boyfriend." Link was either a much more serious person than I expected, or a much shyer person than I expected--it could have been either one (just compared to, like, Aimee Bender, who writes oddball stuff and is kind of an oddball herself, Link seemed pretty sober). The crowd was pretty small, but it's a Friday and people were probably thinking bars more than bookstores. Well, people that aren't huge nerds.

A person can be an asshole and still be a good writer; I don't worry too much about a writer being a nice person, I worry about them being a good writer. That said, it's always an absolute blessing to encounter a writer who is kind. One test for this is how well they stand up to the book signing and the questions. I stood in line for a while with my books, and overheard a number of conversations. One girl, tripping over her own tongue with awkwardness, blurted that she wanted to write "just like" Link. In front of me was an overly made-up teenaged girl who could barely speak for shyness when she handed over her copy of Magic for Beginners. Link, for her part, responded to everyone with absolute generosity. Quiet words of encouragement. And when she smiled at the teenager in front of me, it was with about a million beautiful watts.

She was also incredibly secure about her own work, which I really liked. By that I mean she knows what she wants to write, and she writes it. There is zero angst about "what kind of stories" she writes, about genre and about all that nonsense. I raised my hand during Q&A to inquire what she reads, and she mentioned primarily YA books (M.T. Anderson and Holly Black) and also a set of straight fantasy books by Naomi Novik. It surprised me not to hear any of the other "kitchen sink magical realists" on the list--but it was kind of neat that she mentioned all these writers who might get missed by a mainstream audience.

Anyway, I mentioned to her that it amused me that reviewers call her whimsical and charming, because while I don't disagree with them I also find her to be one of the only writers to consistently scare the living shit out of me. "Stone Animals" was one of the most terrifying stories I ever read. She seemed to get a big kick out of that.

Now I would like to go to sleep, but Mr. Lovescats seems to be having some serious sleep apnea business going on tonight, because his snores are like Chinese water torture and it's making me crazy. So instead I'm here, typing this up, watching a Pixies concert on PBS.

The Pixies. On PBS. Does this mean I'm old?