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.
More ebooks from the same author(s) / Editor
296,134 Ebooks in this category
