L'anziana vedova Katharina Kepler viene accusata di stregoneria. A prendere le sue difese ci sono solo i figli e il vicino di casa; una narrazione corale, dove alle voci dei protagonisti si alternano quelle di alcuni abitanti del villaggio chiamati a testimoniare durante il processo. Il racconto di una caccia alle streghe avvenuta in Germania nel XVII secolo, dove si intrecciano fatti realmente accaduti e finzione narrativa, che parla in realtà dei nostri tempi e si rivela un monito provocatorio alla facilità con cui, in un clima di ignoranza e sospetto, la verità può essere distorta e la mentalità del branco può prendere il sopravvento e trasformare persone qualunque in belve feroci.

During the Heian period of ancient Japan (794–1185 AD), when Chinese was still the official language of power and politics, even privileged women of the imperial court were not allowed to learn Chinese and wrote instead in Japanese, using kana — an abbreviated and vernacular system of written characters. Writing in this subordinate script, they produced some of the greatest works of world literature, including Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji — often considered the first novel — and Sei Shonagon’s sui generis, confessional Pillow Book.This personal essay by the acclaimed Rivka Galchen sets out from these ancient Japanese women writers in search of “the small” throughout the history of literature — from Emily Dickinson to Fyodor Dostoevsky, from Robert Walser to Marianne Moore — before returning to the Land of the Rising Sun and its contemporary boom of young female Japanese crime fiction writers.

A BRILLIANT NEW COLLECTION OF SHORT STORIES FROM THE "CONSPICUOUSLY TALENTED" (TIME) RIVKA GALCHEN

In one of the intensely imaginative stories in Rivka 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.

AMERICAN INNOVATIONS - GALCHEN RIVKA - Harper UK

While everyone else may be fooled, psychiatrist Leo Liebenstein knows better. His wife is not his wife. She is a dead-ringera doppelgangerbut something is very wrong. This isn’t Rema. Could it be that his wife is involved in some infidelity? But why would infidelity lead to disappearance? Or false appearance? With nothing for Leo to go on except a potential clue relating to one of his patients, Harveya man who believes he is a secret agent with control over the weatherLeo sets off on a humorous and science-steeped odyssey to unravel the mystery of his missing wife and to resolve Harvey’s “conflict with the consensus view of reality.” Moving from New York City to the southern reaches of Patagonia,Atmospheric Disturbances is a brilliantly inventive and addictive adventure, mixed with a scientific exploration of the uncontested truths we know are false.

Convinced that his wife has disappeared and left behind a duplicate of herself who fools everyone else, Dr. Leo Liebenstein embarks on a quixotic journey to reclaim his lost love, an effort during which he is aided by a deluded psychiatric patient and an enigmatic meteorologist. Simultaneous.