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 "e;Anecdote of the Jar"e; as a response to John Keats' "e;Ode on a Grecian Urn,"e; Galchen's "e;The Lost Order"e; covertly recapitulates James Thurber's "e;The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,"e; while "e;The Region of Unlikeness"e; is a smoky and playful mirror to Jorge Luis Borges's "e;The Aleph."e; The title story, "e;American Innovations,"e; reimagines Nikolai Gogol's "e;The Nose."e; 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.

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 "e;Anecdote of the Jar"e; as a response to John Keats' "e;Ode on a Grecian Urn,"e; Galchen's "e;The Lost Order"e; covertly recapitulates James Thurber's "e;The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,"e; while "e;The Region of Unlikeness"e; is a smoky and playful mirror to Jorge Luis Borges's "e;The Aleph."e; The title story, "e;American Innovations,"e; reimagines Nikolai Gogol's "e;The Nose."e; 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.