American Innovations
-
- 65,00 kr
-
- 65,00 kr
Publisher Description
A short-story collection from one of America’s brightest young talents.
In one of these intensely imaginative stories a young woman’s 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, Galchen’s 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 Thurber’s ‘The Secret Life of Walter Mitty’, while ‘The Region of Unlikeness’ playfully mirrors Jorge Luis Borges’s ‘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 Leo’s 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. It’s 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'
About the author
Rivka Galchen grew up in Oklahoma, the child of Israeli immigrants. She 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 The Believer, Harper's, The New Yorker, Scientific American and The New York Times. Her first novel, Atmospheric Disturbances, was published in 2008 and in 2010 she was named by The New Yorker as one of the top twenty American authors under the age of forty.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Unassuming characters meet confounding and uncanny situations in Galchen's first collection of short stories. "The Lost Order," which opens the collection, features the unemployed wife of Walter Mitty, who takes a food delivery order over the phone from a person who has dialed the wrong number. It is one of the many stories in the collection that approach classic tales from the perspective of a female character. The title story reimagines the plot of Nikolai Gogol's "The Nose" with a library sciences student at the center; but rather than losing her nose (like Gogol's narrator), she finds that a third breast has grown on her side. And in "The Region of Unlikeness," which considers Borges's "The Aleph," an engineering student becomes spellbound by a duo of effusive self-proclaimed professors cooking up equations for time travel. Many of Galchen's characters are trained in the hard sciences quantum mechanics, epigenetics, dangerous molds and bring an empirical authority to off-kilter situations. Coming eight years after her widely acclaimed debut, Atmospheric Disturbances, Galchen dips further into the dazzlingly disorienting. These stories balance on the surreal, striking the borders of the logical and the hypothetical. There is the author of a self-published book of correspondence who meets one of his few readers in Mexico City; the furniture that flees through an apartment window one night, only to reappear in the nearby market the next week; the remembrance of a painful first love: and a McDonald's clerk with the one shining white tooth. Here, language and humor lift the ideas off the page. With her second book, Galchen continues to secure a place for herself among today's great prose stylists.