American Innovations

Starred review from March 3, 2014
Unassuming characters meet confounding and uncanny situations in Galchen’s first collection of short stories. “The Lost Order,” which opens the collection, features the unemployed wife of Walter Mitty, who takes a food delivery order over the phone from a person who has dialed the wrong number. It is one of the many stories in the collection that approach classic tales from the perspective of a female character. The title story reimagines the plot of Nikolai Gogol’s “The Nose” with a library sciences student at the center; but rather than losing her nose (like Gogol’s narrator), she finds that a third breast has grown on her side. And in “The Region of Unlikeness,” which considers Borges’s “The Aleph,” an engineering student becomes spellbound by a duo of effusive self-proclaimed professors cooking up equations for time travel. Many of Galchen’s characters are trained in the hard sciences—quantum mechanics, epigenetics, dangerous molds—and bring an empirical authority to off-kilter situations. Coming eight years after her widely acclaimed debut, Atmospheric Disturbances, Galchen dips further into the dazzlingly disorienting. These stories balance on the surreal, striking the borders of the logical and the hypothetical. There is the author of a self-published book of correspondence who meets one of his few readers in Mexico City; the furniture that flees through an apartment window one night, only to reappear in the nearby market the next week; the remembrance of a painful first love: a McDonald’s clerk with the one shining white tooth. Here, language and humor lift the ideas off the page. With her second book, Galchen continues to secure a place for herself among today’s great prose stylists.

Starred review from April 1, 2014
In this story collection--which follows her debut novel, the well-received Atmospheric Disturbances (2008)--Galchen, one of the New Yorker's 20 Under 40, continues to plumb the unbelievable and unknowable mysteries of existence. These are literary short stories, but there's a detective lurking in their author, who peels back fine layers of life with close observation to uncover clues about the physics of daily living and how we process the world. In the title story, a woman wakes one morning to discover a third breast has grown on her back; she has to wrestle with societal expectations of beauty and identity. In "Once an Empire," the narrator says, "I'm a pretty normal woman...," which immediately cues the reader to wonder what isn't normal about her, or the story; soon she's watching the contents of her apartment--furniture, utensils and objects--get up and walk out. Do these things represent her life, and if they're so important to her, why is she willing to watch them leave? And things get stranger in "The Region of Unlikeness": A woman discovers that her crush, a man she met at a cafe, is supposedly a time traveler, and his friend, whom she doesn't much care for, is his father--and maybe her potential future husband. Not all the stories venture into the fantastic, though; many poke and prod at the challenges of the everyday, as in "Sticker Shock," which compares the finances of a mother and daughter and is written in the tone of an accountant's review, and "The Lost Order," in which a woman obscures the fact that she's lost her job from her husband and ponders what her life will be like as "a daylight ghost, a layabout, a mal pensant, a vacancy, a housewife, a person foiled by the challenge of getting dressed...." Galchen's stories feel remarkably believable, despite their suggestion of alternate worlds and lives. This is a collection to read and keep on the bookshelf. It will stand the test of time.

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May 1, 2014
Galchen's collection of short stories won't be for everyone. But for readers who appreciate the absurd, her stories are exercises of uncommon poetry. Each story in the collection is inspired by a masterpiece of the form. The title story, in which a woman wakes up with a breast growing out of her back, takes Gogol's The Nose as its point of departure. The Region of Unlikeness, in which a young woman befriends a pair of men, one of whom may or may not be her son from the future, is anchored in Jorge Luis Borges' The Aleph. The stories are odd and unsettling but burst with brilliant moments of dialogue and observation. And humor, as when one character admits that the reality of her new career is in fact highly nonoverlapping with her preconception of it. In another character's attempt to get a refund for an expensive heart-rate monitor, Galchen unfolds both the woman's foolishness and the surreal nature of bureaucracy, which leaves us feeling caught in a Kafkaesque maze of roadblocks and stubborn illogicalities. The wrestling of her main charactersall womenwith their gender further complicates their attempts to find footing in an unstable reality.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)

Starred review from April 15, 2014
The problem with the stories in this clever, urbane, and sometimes surreal collection from the author of the breakout novel "Atmospheric Disturbances" is that there are only ten of them. The settings are all over the map, both globally and emotionally. An adult daughter's relationship with her mother is detailed in real estate jargon. A woman seems to witness her personal belongings supernaturally fleeing her apartment. A nine-year-old has a somber first crush on a tattooed McDonald's server. A young writer takes her Asian stepmother to a conference, where the writer feels inept while her stepmother charms everyone. A few pieces are playful reflections of classic short stories, according to the promotion--useful information since the connections aren't immediately obvious. In the title story, for example, a play on Gogol's "The Nose," a young library science student with a sardonic view of "information" develops a third breast; the protagonist bears her condition with bemused concern. VERDICT Galchen's prose gets into the eerie, angst-filled interior monologs of young women veering toward middle age yet leavens the anxiety with wry humor. [See Prepub Alert, 12/7/13.]--Reba Leiding, emeritus, James Madison Univ. Lib., Harrisonburg, VA

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 1, 2013

Galchen has been publishing stories and essays in venues like The New Yorker, which named her one of its "20 Under 40" American fiction writers in 2010. But we've been waiting for something bigger since her eye-catching debut, 2008's Atmospheric Disturbances, and here it is: a whimsical story collection.

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.