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CORVALLIS, Ore. – Short story writer Deborah Eisenberg will give a free public reading at Oregon State University on Friday, March 16, beginning at 7:30 p.m. in the main floor rotunda of the Valley Library.

Eisenberg will read from her latest collection, “Twilight of the Superheroes.”

Eisenberg’s visit to Corvallis is sponsored by the OSU Visiting Writers Series, and supported by the Valley Library, the Office of the Provost, and the OSU Department of English.

Eisenberg is an acknowledged master of the short story form. “Twilight of the Superheroes” took eight years to complete, and is imbued with the terrors and ironies of modern life.

Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times wrote of the collection: “Using her playwright’s ear for dialogue and a journalistic eye or the askew detail, Ms. Eisenberg gives us – in just a handful of pages – a visceral sense of these characters’ daily routines, the worlds they inhabit and the families they rebel against or allow to define them.”

The New York Times Book Review pronounced her “one of the most important fiction writers now at work.”

Eisenberg is the author of four other short story collections, including “Under the 82nd Airborne,” “All Around Atlantis,” and “The Stories (So Far) of Deborah Eisenberg.” She also is the author of a play, “Pastorale,” produced by the Second Stage in New York in 1982. Eisenberg has written for The New Yorker, Bomb, and The Yale Review.

A professor of creative writing at the University of Virginia, she is the recipient of a Whiting Writers Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, and multiple O. Henry Awards.