ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Willing Davidson provided essential editorial advice for almost all of these stories; I am likewise indebted to Eric Chinski, Carin Besser, Deborah Treisman, Claire Gutierrez, Ben Metcalf, Joanna Yas, and Jared Bland. The literary agent Bill Clegg has also been a wonder. I am furthermore grateful for the support of the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, the Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fiction Fellowship of the American Academy in Berlin, and the Hald Hovedgaard Danish-American Writers’ Retreat.
About the Author
RIVKA GALCHEN is the recipient of a William Saroyan International Prize for Fiction Writing and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, among other distinctions. She writes regularly for The New Yorker, whose editors selected her for their list of “20 Under 40” American fiction writers in 2010. Her debut novel, the critically acclaimed Atmospheric Disturbances, was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. Born in Toronto, Rivka Galchen now lives in New York City.
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ALSO BY RIVKA GALCHEN
Atmospheric Disturbances
Praise for AMERICAN INNOVATIONS
“I am always declaiming to whoever will listen that Rivka Galchen is one of the best things going. She writes for the joy of it and so artfully, and she conforms to no one else’s standards. Joy and artfulness: Why are these so rare? But they are. Galchen is a stand-alone talent.”
—RACHEL KUSHNER, author of The Flamethrowers
“The stories in American Innovations proceed through indirection, association, and surprise, making a world in which daily life becomes a dream of life. Their narrators go in search of emotional resolution but instead find that the furniture is getting up and leaving the house. Galchen’s stories can read almost as meditations on themselves, and their gift to the reader is the sudden and pleasurable awareness of the things we understand the least— the deaths of parents, breakdowns in love, and the hopeful pursuit of joy.”
—DONALD ANTRIM, author of The Verificationist
“Rivka Galchen writes about the strangeness of being alive—not that anyone has any other state to compare being alive to, which doesn’t make it any less strange. She writes with intelligence, wit, and great originality. These stories are amazing.”
—ROZ CHAST, author of Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?
“Rivka Galchen is the pinball wizard of American letters, with a narrative voice that can ricochet from wonder to terror to hilarity in the breadth of a breath. These ten stories of profound loss and profound joy give the Kantian sublime a key lime twist, and reveal what happily haunted space cadets we all are in the echo chamber of our ‘ordinary’ American lives. You’ll feel compelled to read Galchen’s sentences to strangers on buses. The delicacy and brilliance of what she is doing doesn’t yet have a name.”
—KAREN RUSSELL, author of Vampires in the Lemon Grove
Credits
Cover design by John Fulbrook III
Cover photograph by Samantha T. Photography / Getty Image
Copyright
American Innovations
Copyright © 2014 by Rivka Galchen.
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EPUB EDITION © APRIL 2014 ISBN: 9781443425933
Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd by arrangement with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.
FIRST CANADIAN EDITION
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