{"product_id":"9780811227827","title":"Some Trick: Thirteen Stories","description":"\u003cp\u003eAt last a new book: a baker’s dozen of stories all with Helen DeWitt’s razor-sharp genius\u003cbr\u003eFor sheer unpredictable brilliance, Gogol may come to mind, but no author alive today takes a reader as far as Helen DeWitt into the funniest, most yonder dimensions of possibility. Her jumping-off points might be statistics, romance, the art world’s piranha tank, games of chance and games of skill, the travails of publishing, or success. “Look,” a character begins to explain, laying out some gambit reasonably enough, even if facing a world of boomeranging counterfactuals, situations spinning out to their utmost logical extremes, and Rube Goldberg-like moving parts, where things prove “more complicated than they had first appeared” and “at 3 a.m. the circumstances seem to attenuate.” In various ways, each tale carries DeWitt’s signature poker-face lament regarding the near-impossibility of the life of the mind when one is made to pay to have the time for it, in a world so sadly “taken up with all sorts of paraphernalia superfluous, not to say impedimental, to ratiocination.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"New Directions Publishing Corporation","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47016587624688,"sku":"9780811227827","price":22.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9780811227827_p0.jpg?v=1763742862","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9780811227827","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}