American Innovations

(Paperback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

A short-story collection from one of Americas brightest young talents.
In one of these intensely imaginative stories a young womans furniture walks out on her. In another, the narrator feels compelled 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 dependences and loves of a family.

Following spiralling paths towards utterly logical, entirely absurd conclusions, Galchens creations occupy a dreamlike dimension, where time is fluid and identities are best defined by the qualities they lack. The tales in this groundbreaking collection are secretly in conversation with canonical stories, allowing the reader the pleasure of discovering familiar favourites in new guises. Here The Lost Order covertly recapitulates James Thurbers The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, while The Region of Unlikeness playfully mirrors Jorge Luis Borgess The Aleph.

By turns realistic, fantastical and lyrical, all these marvellously uneasy stories share a deeply emotional core and are written in dryly witty, pitch-perfect prose. Whether exploring the tensions in a mother-daughter relationship or the finer points of time travel, Galchen is a writer of eye-opening ingenuity.

Reviews

Inventive and appealing Independent on Sunday

The American short story's vintage year continues Gently, Galchen interrogates the nature and necessity of innovation with results that prove hopeful, funny and innovative Max Liu, Independent

Dazed Strikingly beautiful Galchen's stories are funny and inventive. Many of them slyly translate the concerns of 19th-century fiction money, property, gender into the affectless, ironic voice of modern American fiction One of the pleasures of American Innovations is the way the stories quietly echo and seep into one another The prose is always expertly controlled David Wolf, Guardian

Praise for Atmospheric Disturbances:

'What is strongest in the novel is the delicacy with which Galchen evokes the bewildering randomness of Leos visionary insanity An original and affecting novel, one that knows how to move from the comic to the painful. James Wood, New Yorker

'Genuinely suspenseful, fresh and wry Galchen is a writer to be watched. The Economist

A playful and moving novel. Daily Telegraph

Playful yet profound, Murakami-esque yet original, analytical yet heartbreaking. Its an absolutely stunning and unforgettable debut. Vendela Vida, author of Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name

'A powerful novel about love, longing, Doppler radar, and the true appreciation of a nice cookie with your tea. Atmospheric Disturbances is fantastic.' Nathan Englander, author of 'The Ministry of Special Cases'

Author Bio

Rivka Galchen received her MD from Mount Sinai School of Medicine, having spent a year in South America working on public health issues. Her fiction and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in The Believer, Harper's, The New Yorker, Scientific American and The New York Times. This is her first novel.