'Riveting' Margaret Atwood 'I loved this book intensely' Lauren Groff Guardian The plague is spreading. The hundred year war is beginning. Katharina Kepler is believed to be a witch. Known for her herbal remedies and successful children - among them Johannes, Imperial Mathematician and author of the laws of planetary motion - Katharina's life is changed by an accusation of witchcraft. Facing financial ruin, torture and even execution, she tells her side of the story. Witty, engaging and vividly imagined, Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch draws on historical documents to illuminate a society undone by collective aggression and hysterical fear - a narrative with true resonance for today. 'Darkly funny ... Her prose, which recalls Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, is light, pared back and subtly archaic' Financial Times 'Superbly voiced ... funny' Telegraph 'A magical brew of absurdity and brutality' Washington Post 'Galchen expertly weaves together a story told from multiple perspectives, showing how easy it is for a mob mentality to take hold in a climate of fear and ignorance when a woman simply exists outside of the norm' New York Times

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.

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."

AN OBSERVER BOOK OF THE YEAR A droll and dazzling compendium of observations, stories, lists, and brief essays about babies. 'Beguiling ... A wunderkabinett of baby-related curios ... A peculiar book, and astonishing in its effect.' Boston Globe One August day, a baby was born, or as it seemed to Rivka Galchen, a puma moved into her apartment. Her arrival felt supernatural, she seemed to come from another world. And suddenly, the world seemed ludicrously, suspiciously, adverbially sodden with meaning. But Galchen didn't want to write about the puma. She had never been interested in babies, or in mothers before. Now everything seemed directly related to them and she specifically wanted to write about other things because it might mean she was really, covertly, learning something about babies, or about being near babies. The result is Little Labours, a slanted enchanted miscellany. Galchen writes about babies in art (with wrongly shaped head) and babies in literature (rarer than dogs or abortions, often monstrous); about the effort of taking a passport photo for a baby not yet able to hold up her head and the frightening prevalence of orange as today's chic colour for baby gifts; about Frankenstein as a sort of baby and a baby as a sort of Godzillas. In doing so she opens up an odd and tender world of wonder.

The stories here collected under the title Five Women combine two different volumes. All together, these stories, each of which (as the reader will guess) has a woman at the apparent centre of its gaze, has the feel of a series study, or of a natural history, though one performed in a strange and not entirely rational laboratory, or field. The intensity in these stories derives in part from looking at humans under the very ordinary extremities of love and desire. Neither love, nor femininity, is the subject matter so much as it is the medium. Translated by Eithne Wilkins & Ernst Kaiser

A "New York Times" Notable Book of the Year
A "Salon.com" Top Ten Book of the Year
A "Plain Dealer" (Cleveland) Best Book of the Year
A "Slate "Best Book of the Year
When Dr. Leo Liebenstein's wife disappears, she leaves behind a single confounding clue: a woman who looks, talks, and behaves exactly like her. A simulatcrum. But Leo is not fooled, and he knows better than to trust his senses in matters of the heart. Certain that the real Rema is alive and in hiding, he embarks on a quixotic journey to reclaim her. With the help of his psychiatric patient Harvey--who believes himself to be a secret agent able to conrtol the weather--his investigation leads him from the streets of "New York City" to the southernmost reaches of Patagonia, in search of the woman he loves. "Atmospheric Disturbances" is a "witty, tender, and conceptually dazzling" ("Booklist") novel about the mysterious nature of human relationships.

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.