American Innovations
3.5/5
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About this ebook
A wickedly smart and deeply emotional collection of imaginative stories
In one of the intensely imaginative stories in Rivka Galchen’s American Innovations, a narrator’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 around a property transaction detail the complicated pains and loves of a family.
The stories in this unusual collection also have secret lives in conversation with earlier stories. As in the tradition of considering Wallace Stevens’s “Anecdote of the Jar” as a response to John Keats’ “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,” reimagines Nikolai Gogol’s “The Nose.”
Alternately realistic, fantastical, witty and lyrical, these are all deeply emotional tales, written in exuberant, pitch-perfect prose and shadowed by the darkly marvellous and the marvellously uneasy. Whether exploring the tensions in a mother-daughter relationship or the finer points of time travel, Galchen takes great risks, proving that she is a writer like none other today.
Rivka Galchen
Rivka Galchen received her MD from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, having spent a year in South America working on public health issues. Galchen completed her MFA at Columbia University, where she was a Robert Bingham Fellow. Her essay on the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics was published in The Believer, and she is the recipient of a 2006 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. Galchen lives in New York City. She is the author of the novel Atmospheric Disturbances.
Read more from Rivka Galchen
Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2012 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Atmospheric Disturbances: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5American Innovations: Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Rat Rule 79: An Adventure Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
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Reviews for American Innovations
27 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The ten stories in this collection are by turns startling, bemusing, quirky, and real, or conversely, profound. Each is very much its own thing; style, diction, even the narrative approach vary markedly. About the only thing in common, I imagine, is the response most people would have to reading one of them, something like, “Who wrote that?” Any one of them would have been reason enough for me to read everything else by its author. Collectively it’s almost a surfeit.One thing that struck me was how Galchen’s phrases, her word choices, and even her juxtapositions would catch me up short. I found I couldn’t anticipate. And rather than find that distressing, here I found it delightful. Whether it was the economic valuations of “Sticker Shock,” or the weight of the crush in “Wild Berry Blue,” something here felt excessively true, but gently so. A story such as “The Late Novels of Gene Hackman,” probably shouldn’t work as well as it does. But it does. And so you begin to think that Galchen is doing something very impressive — pushing the short story form itself in new directions. Or maybe she’s got a knack for a modern idiom that I’ve only just now cottoned on to.Other than those already mentioned, my favourites included: “American Innovations,” “The Lost Order,” and, “Once an Empire.” Your favourites may differ.Certainly recommended.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I liked a few of the stories that Rivka Galchen's stories got published in the usual magazines very much, but wasn't thrilled about her novel, "Atmospheric Disturbances, which leaned a bit too hard on a single plot conceit for my taste. This collection reminded me of why I'd liked her stuff so much, though. There are stories here that apply experimental rigor to literary science fiction ("The Region of Unlikeliness") and others, both set in Oklahoma, that describe the seismic emotional shifts of early adolescence. But Galchen's real interest seems to be the uncanny. Events that would seem jarring, or else too cute, in the hands of a less-skilled writer seem natural, even pleasant, in hers. and her stories, even those that seem more like intriguing studies than problems solved, are little worlds filled with infinite surprise. The author's a bit of a purposeful mimic, and drags some modes of expression that aren't native to the short story into literary terrain. Her narrators, generally young and female, employ scientific terminology or arch academic jargon -- as in the title story -- to describe what happens, but the overall effect is curiously musical. It's their openness to their these unusual experiences that stays with you most: her protagonists confront strangeness in their lives with optimism and good humor and the author's prose, which is filled with risk-taking verbal juxtapositions and unexpected images but remains light and fluid throughout, seems to encourage the reader to adopt a similar attitude, if only for the length of time that it takes to read a short story. The author's belief in narrative and her well-crafted sentences act as leveling forces on her plots. This isn't for everyone, but I found this stuff delightful. Rivka's a genuine talent, and she seems very much in her groove here.