A short-story collection from one of America's brightest young talents. In one of these intensely imaginative stories a young woman's furniture walks out on her. In another, the narrator feels compelled 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 dependences and loves of a family. Following spiralling paths towards utterly logical, entirely absurd conclusions, Galchen's creations occupy a dreamlike dimension, where time is fluid and identities are best defined by the qualities they lack. The tales in this groundbreaking collection are secretly in conversation with canonical stories, allowing the reader the pleasure of discovering familiar favourites in new guises. Here 'The Lost Order' covertly recapitulates James Thurber's 'The Secret Life of Walter Mitty', while 'The Region of Unlikeness' playfully mirrors Jorge Luis Borges's 'The Aleph'. By turns realistic, fantastical and lyrical, all these marvellously uneasy stories share a deeply emotional core and are written in dryly witty, pitch-perfect prose.

Whether exploring the tensions in a mother-daughter relationship or the finer points of time travel, Galchen is a writer of eye-opening ingenuity. Gold title * The short story is going from strength to strength - Alice Munro was awarded the Nobel, Lydia Davis has won the International Man Booker Prize, George Saunders won the Folio Prize - and Rivka Galchen's collection is yet more proof of this. * The collection follows her critically acclaimed first novel ATMOSTPHERIC DISTURBANCES. This has been translated into over 20 languages and won the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. It was also a finalist for the 2008 Governor General's Award, one of Canada's most prestigious literary prizes. * Rivka was chosen as one of the 'New Yorker' 20 under 40 alongside Jonathan Safran Foer (over 250,000 copies sold), Nicole Krauss (more than 180,000 copies sold), Joshua Ferris (over 190,000 copies sold) and Gary Shteyngart (over 38,000 copies sold). * She has been compared to David Foster Wallace, Helen DeWitt, Haruki Murakami and Kafka.