Little Labors - Tapa dura

To read Rivka Galchen is to enter a wonderland where the bizarre and the mundane march in unlikely lockstep.--Michael Lindgren

A brilliant young writer.

Galchen has a knack for taking a thread and fraying it, so that a sentence never quite ends up where you expect.--James Wood

Galchen is an elegant and careful writer.

An engaging mind offers reflections on being a mother, being a writer, and having a baby.

Galchen is, for my money, one of the most gifted stylists writing in American English today. Her funniness is otherworldly; she is the reigning champion of litotes, or understatement for effect. Preternaturally deft, Galchen can do almost anything with next to nothing.

This essay collection from fiction and science writer Rivka Galchen is not your mother's motherhood lit. Brief, gemlike reflections on adjusting to life under the rule of a baby daughter (called 'the puma') are interwoven with literary and historical references. It's a book that will ring both familiar and strange.--Anya Kamenetz

As Galchen adeptly demonstrates, the pram in the hall is no longer the sombre enemy of good art--ignoring it is.--Gavin Tomson

Galchen's sentences catch your attention and hold it with a tight fist: Delicious.--Alan Cheuse

No training wheels, no banisters, no practice breaths, Galchen drives right in to a fantastical series of meditations, observations, mysterious epiphanies, and failures of belief brought on in a mother, presumably Galchen, caring for her infant daughter, often called "the puma." Galchen does something more profound than tackle motherhood; she utterly reinvents and reanimates the subject.--Christopher Bollen

Sei Shonagon’s Pillow Book—a key inspiration for Rivka Galchen’s new book—contains a list of “Things That Make One Nervous.” And wouldn’t the blessed event top almost anyone’s list?Little Labors is a slanted, enchanted literary miscellany. Varying in length from just a sentence or paragraph to a several-page story or essay, Galchen’s puzzle pieces assemble into a shining, unpredictable, mordant picture of the ordinary-extraordinary nature of babies and literature. Anecdotal or analytic, each part opens up an odd and tender world of wonder. The 47 Ronin; the black magic of maternal love; babies morphing from pumas to chickens; the quasi-repellent concept of “women writers”; origami-ophilia in Oklahoma as a gateway drug to a lifelong obsession with Japan; discussions of favorite passages from the Heian masterpieces Genji and The Pillow Book; the frightening prevalence of orange as today’s new chic color for baby gifts; Frankenstein as a sort of baby; babies gold mines; babies as tiny Godzillas ...Little Labors–atomized and exploratory, conceptually byzantine and freshly forthright–delights.