A wickedly smart and deeply emotional collection of imaginative stories In one of the intensely imaginative stories in Rivka Galchens American Innovations, a narrators 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 around a property transaction detail the complicated pains and loves of a family. The stories in this unusual collection also have secret lives in conversation with earlier stories. As in the tradition of considering Wallace Stevenss Anecdote of the Jar as a response to John Keats Ode on a Grecian Urn, Galchens The Lost Order covertly recapitulates James Thurbers The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, while The Region of Unlikeness is a smoky and playful mirror to Jorge Luis Borgess The Aleph. The title story, American Innovations, reimagines Nikolai Gogols The Nose. Alternately realistic, fantastical, witty and lyrical, these are all deeply emotional tales, written in exuberant, pitch-perfect prose and shadowed by the darkly marvellous and the marvellously uneasy. Whether exploring the tensions in a mother-daughter relationship or the finer points of time travel, Galchen takes great risks, proving that she is a writer like none other today.