Deborah Eisenberg and I sit at a glass table in her apartment in Chelsea, in New York City. The ceilings are high, the windows are open, the hardwood floor gleams. As Eisenberg speaks, I observe her hands, which resemble and at times function as punctuation marks—her palms curl like commas under the chin. The manual gestures clarify her responses; the words are separated with fingers, pauses.

The focus of our conversation is the publication of Eisenberg’s fifth collection of short stories, Your Duck Is My Duck (2018). Eisenberg is recognized as a preeminent practitioner of the short story, and is the recipient of numerous honors, including the 2019 Hadada Award for lifetime achievement from The Paris Review. She crafts characters who may qualify as defective goods, their shortcomings gauged internally or externally, or both. In the titular story of Your Duck Is My Duck, the narrator sends her ex-boyfriend an accusatory email while under the influence of sleeping medication. He replies by owning up to his being. “I’m not someone who falls short of me—I’m me. I’m not a magic number, I’m just some biped.” How to navigate the world in the face of our own defectiveness is one of the recurring pulls of Eisenberg’s fiction.

Throughout our interview, the landline phone rings and rings and rings and rings and—at one point she excuses herself from the table to determine why her answering machine is failing and to find out why her very good friend refuses to stop calling. 

I press pause on the recorder and I think it will save. It does not. I am immediately aware that I have botched the recording, and I report my negligence to Eisenberg. 

Her friend is fine. The answering machine is full. She offers to make us a pot of tea—which of two loose-leaf green teas would I prefer? One is floral and the other you’d want to have “with a bowl of popcorn,” Eisenberg says. 

Eisenberg pours the floral tea into porcelain cups, set next to a book of old comic strips: Pogo, by Walt Kelly. “Tape malfunctions are surprisingly—shockingly—common,” Eisenberg says. “Really—relatively—it’s no big deal. We’ll start over.” 

—Zach Davidson

I. “GETTING CLOSER TO WHAT IS ESSENTIALLY INEXPRESSIBLE.”

DEBORAH EISENBERG: [Looking at Pogo] That’s the alligator that I so love. Albert the alligator. I think he’s running for office.

THE BELIEVER: If only.

DE: I know. I know it. And this is the eponymous Pogo, who is a possum. 

BLVR: The Pogo comic strip is set in the Okefenokee Swamp, in the southeastern United States?

DE: Yes. I can’t...