American Innovations: Stories - Softcover

Galchen, Rivka

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1250069238 ISBN 13: 9781250069238

Publisher: St. Martin's Press, 2015

Synopsis

A BRILLIANT NEW COLLECTION OF SHORT STORIES FROM THE "CONSPICUOUSLY TALENTED" (TIME) RIVKA GALCHEN

Winner of the Danuta Gleed Literary Award
A New York Times Book Review Notable Book

Chosen as one of fifteen remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write in the 21st century by the book critics of The New York Times

In one of the intensely imaginative stories in Rivka 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

Review:

To read Rivka Galchen is to enter a wonderland where the bizarre and the mundane march in unlikely lockstep. "Michael Lindgren, The Washington Post"

Spectral, demanding stories from a brilliant young writer. "Elle"

Galchen's sentences catch your attention and hold it with a tight fist . . . Delicious stories. "Alan Cheuse, NPR.org"

Skillful, imaginative, often funny . . . In that grand tradition of American innovators, perhaps Ms. Galchen's greatest artistic creation is herself. "The New York Times Book Review""

"To read Rivka Galchen is to enter a wonderland where the bizarre and the mundane march in unlikely lockstep." --Michael Lindgren, The Washington Post

"Spectral, demanding stories from a brilliant young writer." --Elle

"Galchen's sentences catch your attention and hold it with a tight fist . . . Delicious stories." --Alan Cheuse, NPR.org

"Skillful, imaginative, often funny . . . In that grand tradition of American innovators, perhaps Ms. Galchen's greatest artistic creation is herself." --The New York Times Book Review

"[A] witty, winning collection...The DNA in these stories may be old, but Galchen has uncovered a new register and a new space for the domestic and the fantastic to meet. There might be no better model for looking to the past in order to move forward." --The New York Times (The New Vanguard: Remarkable Books by Women That Are Changing the Way We Read and Write Fiction in the 21st Century)

"To read Rivka Galchen is to enter a wonderland where the bizarre and the mundane march in unlikely lockstep." --Michael Lindgren, The Washington Post

"Spectral, demanding stories from a brilliant young writer." --Elle

"Galchen's sentences catch your attention and hold it with a tight fist . . . Delicious stories." --Alan Cheuse, NPR.org

"Skillful, imaginative, often funny . . . In that grand tradition of American innovators, perhaps Ms. Galchen's greatest artistic creation is herself." --The New York Times Book Review

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1250069238
• ISBN 13: 9781250069238
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 192