Books like Transactions in a Foreign Currency

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.