The characters in Deborah Eisenberg's stories are often lost. Whether they travel through a foreign country or their own equally alien, familiar worlds, they are on quests of discovery. Throughout her three volumes of short fiction, this theme is consistently honed and refined. Employing vivid descriptions and poignant symbols, Eisenberg takes her readers along into a world that is strangely familiar. Her witty prose and dramatic delineation of character deepen the sensations of confusion and loss that pervade her fiction.

Deborah Eisenberg was born on 20 November 1945 to George and Ruth Eisenberg in Chicago, Illinois. Her father was a pediatrician, her mother a housewife. Eisenberg has described her childhood in the Chicago suburb of Winnetka as a "hermetically sealed" middle-class existence. In the early 1960s Eisenberg left suburban Illinois for Vermont, where she attended boarding school and later studied Latin and Greek at Marlboro College. Then, in the mid...