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American Innovations: Stories
Rivka Galchen
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
May 2014
On Sale: May 6, 2014
192 pages
ISBN: 0374280479
EAN: 9780374280475
Kindle: B00GET18D4
Hardcover / e-Book
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Fiction
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.
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