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.