"In Little Labors, a highly original book of essays and observations, Rivka Galchen writes, "The world seemed ludicrously, suspiciously, adverbially sodden with meaning." The birth of her daughter, she observes, "made me again more like a writer .'e^.'e^. precisely as she was making me into someone who was, enduringly, not ­writing." [.] I adore Galchen's quiet, and the bravery of this book's fragments. You get the sly sense reading this book that you are not seeing the whole writer; there is a sleight of hand -- something only partially revealed -- so that the fragments glow more.

Her kaleidoscopic subjects leap from the literary to the mundane and back again. In discussing the form of "The Pillow Book," an 11th-century miscellany written by a Japanese lady of the court, Galchen writes that she associates the book with "the 'small' as opposed to the 'minor.''eS" This is an important distinction, and, I think, a defense of her own form. [.] Galchen writes of children: "Their arrival feels supernatural, they seem to come from another world, life near them takes on a certain unaccountable richness, and they are certain, eventually, to leave you." Given the tenderness of that situation (life's richness or design flaw), how can we as writers, and as people, not pay attention? I am happy that Galchen did, and I am confident that many mothers (and other sleepless readers) will pick up this book and feel that they have found an unexpectedly intimate friend.".