Eisenberg was born in Winnetka, Illinois. Her family was Jewish. She grew up in suburban Chicago, Illinois, and moved to New York City in the late 1960s.
Career
Eisenberg was an editorial assistant at The New York Review of Books in 1973. She taught at the University of Virginia from 1994 until 2011, when she accepted a teaching position at Columbia University's MFA writing program.
Writing
Eisenberg has written five collections of stories: Transactions in a Foreign Currency, Under the 82nd Airborne, All Around Atlantis, Twilight of the Superheroes, and Your Duck Is My Duck. Ben Marcus, reviewing Twilight of the Superheroes for The New York Times Book Review, called Eisenberg "one of the most important fiction writers now at work. This work is great." Her first two story collections were republished in one volume as The Work of Deborah Eisenberg. Her first four collections were subsequently reprinted in The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg. She has also written a play, Pastorale, which was produced at Second Stage in New York City in 1982. Eisenberg has written for such magazines as The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The Yale Review.
In April 2015, in an exchange with American PEN’s Executive Director Suzanne Nossel published in The Intercept by Glenn Greenwald, Eisenberg criticized PEN’s decision to bestow its annual Freedom of Expression Courage Award to Charlie Hebdo, calling the choice "an opportunistic exploitation of the horrible murders in Paris to justify and glorify offensive material expressing anti-Islamic and nationalistic sentiments already widely shared in the Western world." Writers Michael Moynihan, Ophelia Benson and Katha Pollitt criticized her for comparing Charlie Hebdo to the Nazi publication Der Stürmer while Jacob Siegel said she had put "dead cartoonists on trial". Joining Eisenberg in her protest of PEN’s award ceremony were Peter Carey, Francine Prose, Teju Cole, Rachel Kushner and Taiye Selasi. In addition, 145 writers—including Junot Diaz, Lorrie Moore, Joyce Carol Oates and Michael Cunningham—signed a letter protesting PEN’s decision. While calling the murders in the offices "sickening and tragic," the letter goes on to say, "PEN is not simply conveying support for freedom of expression but also valorizing selectively offensive material: material that intensifies the anti-Islamic, anti-Maghreb, anti-Arab sentiments already prevalent in the Western world."
