The first thing you notice when reading Eastern Standard Tribe is that it suggests a methodology that Doctorow follows when building his novels: identify and research a cool new idea, add more and more cool bits to that idea, and then build into a story. In Down and Out the cool idea was reputation-based economies, and in Tribe it's a new kind of social group emerging that chooses to abandon its local standard time to live and work in stop with another more desirable one...

Damien Broderick, in a recent review, coined the rather amusing term "blogpunk," which seems to very much apply to Doctorow's work. It refers to the tendency of writers of online journals to accumulate fascinating factoids and then share them amongst themselves. And, to an extent, you can see that in Tribe. The novel's background is full of cool things — cars running on lard and such — but it's just that, background. At its heart, Tribe is a witty, sometimes acerbic poke in the eye at modern culture. Everything comes under Doctorow's microscope, and he manages to be both up to date and off the cuff in the best possible way.

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Review

Advanced Praise for All the Time in the World

“Virtuoso Doctorow is revered for his grandly dimensional novels, but he is also a superlative and transfixing short story writer. The incandescent new stories and forever stunning vintage tales…that Doctorow selected for this powerhouse collection portray psychological outliers on the edge of either liberation or an abyss. Doctorow is rightfully treasured for his social acuity and fluency in urban life, but he is also a penetrating observer of nature and our concealed primal selves….Like iron trellises wreathed with flowering vines, Doctorow’s complex and masterful tales of the strangeness, pain, and beauty of life are wise and resplendent…A landmark collection from a preeminent and popular writer who elevates the best-seller lists with each new book.”
--Booklist

“The new and previously published stories in All the Time in the World are a reminder that, for decades, Mr. Doctorow has been a first-rate artist in the short form, able to coax forth readerly empathy for almost all his creations…Mr. Doctorow is now 80, and as the assessments of his long career commence, it is clear that he has been, like his characters, a man apart from his contemporaries. The stories of All the Time in the World do not seem to belong to any school or style but to emanate from his own solitary visions.”
–WALL STREET JOURNAL

“Wonderful descriptions [and] gorgeous sentences…seem to fall effortlessly from Doctorow's fingertips….Doctorow's stories generally come back to the melancholy reality of imminent doom — yet they are rarely dreary and can be, in fact, quite funny. His characters, trapped as they are, manage to make a ragged music by rattling their chains.”
–CHICAGO TRIBUNE

“Distinctive, sharply focused, glistening with crisp language….Wherever they take place, these memorable stories reflect a novelist’s intimate understanding of human frailty and penchant for delusion….[Doctorow] is also keenly alert to the demands of short fiction, the blend of nuance and straightforwardness that makes stories hum with resonance and vitality…Savor All the Time in the World for its elegance, its intuition and for Doctorow’s understanding of the complexity of the human drama.”
–MIAMI HERALD

“Egoless, frank, spontaneous and altogether wonderful.”
–SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

“[All the Time in the World] gives us a sense of breadth, of movement, of the scope of Doctorow’s career…. [stories that] trace, with grace and acuity, the tension between longing and obligation, between who we are and who we mean to be.”
–L.A. TIMES

“Doctorow seems telepathic in his ability to channel so many different kinds of characters - men and women from a wide range of eras, landscapes, ethnicities. This virtuosity is one reason he’s such a revered writer, though he has other skills, too…As ever, Doctorow has captured the mood of our time and rendered it in compelling fiction.”
–PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER

“The mystery, tension and shock Doctorow is known for are all here in this collection. If you're a fan you will not be disappointed in the new, and happy to be reacquainted with the old.”
—USA TODAY

“This history lover’s nuanced collection of stories shouldn’t be overlooked….delightfully idiosyncratic…Doctorow has always known that whether we act out of love, fear or necessity, these are the imperatives that drive our national consciousness.”
—TIME OUT NEW YORK

"First rate…Never as simple as they seem on the surface, his stories are full of paradox and good humor with a sometimes caustic underbelly; they're absurd in a funny sort of way. He reveals the quirks of our society in the kind of stories others can only aspire to write."
–MINNEAPOLIS STAR TRIBUNE

"Tales of dysfunction, disintegration tempered with wit…Doctorow prefaces the new collection by saying he doesn't expect readers to see the ‘light’ that guided his selection and sequencing of the stories, but it shines vividly and creates a distinctive, sometimes disturbing constellation"
–PORTLAND OREGONIAN

"When its soulful writing and vagrant characters are read in the context of this powerful impression, All the Time in the World feels, more often than not, like a haunting collection of ghost stories."
–RICHMOND TIMES DISPATCH

"Once you immerse yourself in these stories, you'll wish you had all the time in the world…all these stories work on another level, revealing news about the world, yes, but also revealing the mysteries that lie at the heart of human behavior."
–NPR ALL THINGS CONSIDERED

About the Author

E. L. Doctorow’s novels include Homer & Langley, The March, City of God, The Waterworks, Welcome to Hard Times, The Book of Daniel, Ragtime, Loon Lake, Lives of the Poets, World’s Fair, and Billy Bathgate. Among his honors are the National Book Award, three National Book Critics Circle awards, two PEN/Faulkner awards, the William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the presidentially conferred National Humanities Medal. E. L. Doctorow lives in New York City.

Jules is a young man barely a century old. He’s lived long enough to see the cure for death and the end of scarcity, to learn ten languages and compose three symphonies… and to realize his boyhood dream of taking up residence in Disney World.

Disney World! The greatest artistic achievement of the long-ago twentieth century. Now in the care of a network of volunteer “ad-hocs” who keep the classic attractions running as they always have, enhanced with only the smallest high-tech touches.

Now, though, it seems the “ad hocs” are under attack. A new group has taken over the Hall of the Presidents and is replacing its venerable audioanimatronics with new, immersive direct-to-brain interfaces that give guests the illusion of being Washington, Lincoln, and all the others. For Jules, this is an attack on the artistic purity of Disney World itself. Worse: it appears this new group has had Jules killed. This upsets him. (It’s only his fourth death and revival, after all.) Now it’s war: war for the soul of the Magic Kingdom, a war of ever-shifting reputations, technical wizardry, and entirely unpredictable outcomes.