American Innovations: Stories - Hardcover

Galchen, Rivka

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374280479 ISBN 13: 9780374280475

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014

Synopsis

A brilliant new collection of short stories from "the conspicuously talented" (Time) Rivka Galchen

In one of the intensely imaginative stories in Rivka's Galchen's American Innovations, a young woman's furniture walks out on her. In another, the narrator feels compelled to promise to deliver a takeout order that has incorrectly been phoned in to her. In a third, the petty details of a property transaction illuminate the complicated pains and loves of a family.
The tales in this groundbreaking collection are secretly in conversation with canonical stories, reimagined from the perspective of female characters. Just as Wallace Stevens's "Anecdote of the Jar" responds to John Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn," Galchen's "The Lost Order" covertly recapitulates James Thurber's "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty," while "The Region of Unlikeness" is a smoky and playful mirror to Jorge Luis Borges's "The Aleph." The title story, "American Innovations," revisits Nikolai Gogol's "The Nose."
By turns realistic, fantastical, witty, and lyrical, these marvelously uneasy stories are deeply emotional and written in exuberant, pitch-perfect prose. Whether exploring the tensions in a mother-daughter relationship or the finer points of time travel, Galchen is a writer like none other today.

About this title

About the Author

Rivka Galchen is the recipient of a William Saroyan International Prize for Fiction Writing and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, among other distinctions. She writes regularly for The New Yorker, whose editors selected her for their list of "20 Under 40" American fiction writers in 2010. Her debut novel, the critically acclaimed Atmospheric Disturbances, was published by FSG in 2008.

Reviews

Galchen’s collection of short stories won’t be for everyone. But for readers who appreciate the absurd, her stories are exercises of uncommon poetry. Each story in the collection is inspired by a masterpiece of the form. The title story, in which a woman wakes up with a breast growing out of her back, takes Gogol’s “The Nose” as its point of departure. “The Region of Unlikeness,” in which a young woman befriends a pair of men, one of whom may or may not be her son from the future, is anchored in Jorge Luis Borges’ “The Aleph.” The stories are odd and unsettling but burst with brilliant moments of dialogue and observation. And humor, as when one character admits that the reality of her new career is in fact “highly nonoverlapping” with her preconception of it. In another character’s attempt to get a refund for an expensive heart-rate monitor, Galchen unfolds both the woman’s foolishness and the surreal nature of bureaucracy, which leaves us feeling caught in a Kafkaesque maze of roadblocks and stubborn illogicalities. The wrestling of her main characters—all women—with their gender further complicates their attempts to find footing in an unstable reality. --Lynn Weber

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374280479
• ISBN 13: 9780374280475
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 192