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Literature & Fiction

Galchen, Rivka

Genre Fiction

Fourth Estate

American Innovations

Humor & Satire

Little Labours

During the Heian period of ancient Japan (794-1185 AD), when Chinese was still the official language of power and politics, even privileged women of the imperial court were not allowed to learn Chinese and wrote instead in Japanese, using kana -- an abbreviated and vernacular system of written characters. Writing in this subordinate script, they produced some of the greatest works of world literature, including Murasaki Shikibu's The Tale of Genji -- often considered the first novel -- and Sei Shonagon's sui generis, confessional Pillow Book.This personal essay by the acclaimed Rivka Galchen sets out from these ancient Japanese women writers in search of "the small" throughout the history of literature -- from Emily Dickinson to Fyodor Dostoevsky, from Robert Walser to Marianne Moore -- before returning to the Land of the Rising Sun and its contemporary boom of young female Japanese crime fiction writers.

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Fourth Estate Ltd.

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year A Salon.com Top Ten Book of the Year A Plain Dealer (Cleveland) Best Book of the Year A Slate Best Book of the Year
When Dr. Leo Liebenstein's wife disappears, she leaves behind a single confounding clue: a woman who looks, talks, and behaves exactly like her. A simulatcrum. But Leo is not fooled, and he knows better than to trust his senses in matters of the heart. Certain that the real Rema is alive and in hiding, he embarks on a quixotic journey to reclaim her. With the help of his psychiatric patient Harvey--who believes himself to be a secret agent able to control the weather--his investigation leads him from the streets of New York City to the southernmost reaches of Patagonia, in search of the woman he loves. Atmospheric Disturbances is a "witty, tender, and conceptually dazzling" (Booklist) novel about the mysterious nature of human relationships.

Atmospheric Disturbances: A Novel

United States

Picador

When Dr. Leo Liebenstein’s wife disappears, she leaves behind a single, confounding clue: a woman who looks, talks, and behaves exactly like her—or almost exactly like her—and even audaciously claims to be her. While everyone else is fooled by this imposter, Leo knows better than to trust his senses in matters of the heart. Certain that the original Rema is alive and in hiding, Leo embarks on a quixotic journey to reclaim his lost love. With the help of his psychiatric patient Harvey—who believes himself to be a secret agent who can control the weather—Leo attempts to unravel the mystery of the spousal switch. His investigation leads him to the enigmatic guidance of the meteorologist Dr. Tzvi Gal-Chen, the secret workings of the Royal Academy of Meteorology in their cosmic conflict with the 49 Quantum Fathers, and the unwelcome conviction that somehow he—or maybe his wife, or maybe even Harvey—lies at the center of all these unfathomables. From the streets of New York to the southernmost reaches of Patagonia, Leo’s erratic quest becomes a test of how far he is willing to take his struggle against the seemingly uncontestable truth he knows in his heart to be false. Atmospheric Disturbances is at once a moving love story, a dark comedy, a psychological thriller, and a deeply disturbing portrait of a fracturing mind. With tremendous compassion and dazzling literary sophistication, Rivka Galchen investigates the moment of crisis when you suddenly realize that the reality you insist upon is no longer one you can accept, and the person you love has become merely the person you live with. This highly inventive debut explores the mysterious nature of human relationships, and how we spend our lives trying to weather the storms of our own making.

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

The startling, witty, highly anticipated second novel from the critically acclaimed author of Atmospheric Disturbances. The story begins in 1618, in the German duchy of Württemberg. Plague is spreading. The Thirty Years' War has begun, and fear and suspicion are in the air throughout the Holy Roman Empire. In the small town of Leonberg, Katharina Kepler is accused of being a witch. Katharina is an illiterate widow, known by her neighbors for her herbal remedies and the success of her children, including her eldest, Johannes, who is the Imperial Mathematician and renowned author of the laws of planetary motion. It's enough to make anyone jealous, and Katharina has done herself no favors by being out and about and in everyone's business. So when the deranged and insipid Ursula Reinbold (or as Katharina calls her, the Werewolf) accuses Katharina of offering her a bitter, witchy drink that has made her ill, Katharina is in trouble. Her scientist son must turn his attention from the music of the spheres to the job of defending his mother. Facing the threat of financial ruin, torture, and even execution, Katharina tells her side of the story to her friend and next-door neighbor Simon, a reclusive widower imperiled by his own secrets. Drawing on real historical documents but infused with the intensity of imagination, sly humor, and intellectual fire for which Rivka Galchen is known, Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch will both provoke and entertain. The story of how a community becomes implicated in collective aggression and hysterical fear is a tale for our time. Galchen's bold new novel touchingly illuminates a society and a family undone by superstition, the state, and the mortal convulsions of history.

Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch: A Novel

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.

American Innovations: Stories

In paperback at last: Rivka Galchen’s beloved baby bible―slyly hilarious, surprising, and absolutely essential reading for anyone who has ever had, held, or been a baby
In this enchanting miscellany, Galchen notes that literature has more dogs than babies (and also more abortions), that the tally of children for many great women writers―Jane Bowles, Elizabeth Bishop, Virginia Woolf, Janet Frame, Willa Cather, Patricia Highsmith, Iris Murdoch, Djuna Barnes, Mavis Gallant―is zero, that orange is the new baby pink, that The Tale of Genji has no plot but plenty of drama about paternity, that babies exude an intoxicating black magic, and that a baby is a goldmine.

Little Labors

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

New Directions

Rivka Galchen’s Little Labors is a droll and dazzling compendium of observations, stories, lists, and brief essays about babies and literature
Sei Shonagon’s Pillow Book―a key inspiration for Rivka Galchen’s new book―contains a list of “Things That Make One Nervous.” And wouldn’t the blessed event top almost anyone’s list?
Little Labors is a slanted, enchanted literary miscellany. Varying in length from just a sentence or paragraph to a several-page story or essay, Galchen’s puzzle pieces assemble into a shining, unpredictable, mordant picture of the ordinary-extraordinary nature of babies and literature. Anecdotal or analytic, each part opens up an odd and tender world of wonder. The 47 Ronin; the black magic of maternal love; babies morphing from pumas to chickens; the quasi-repellent concept of “women writers”; origami-ophilia in Oklahoma as a gateway drug to a lifelong obsession with Japan; discussions of favorite passages from the Heian masterpieces Genji and The Pillow Book; the frightening prevalence of orange as today’s new chic color for baby gifts; Frankenstein as a sort of baby; babies gold mines; babies as tiny Godzillas …
Little Labors–atomized and exploratory, conceptually byzantine and freshly forthright–delights.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Galchen, Rivka. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Galchen, Rivka

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Galchen, Rivka. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Untitled

American Innovations

American Innovations

Little Labours

Atmospheric Disturbances: A Novel

Atmospheric Disturbances: A Novel

Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch: A Novel

American Innovations: Stories

Little Labors

Little Labors