Little Labors

by Rivka Galchen

Overview

Rivka Galchen’s Little Labors is a droll and dazzling compendium of observations, stories, lists, and brief essays about babies and literature

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811225588
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	05/17/2016
Pages:	136
Product dimensions:	4.80(w) x 7.40(h) x 2.40(d)

About the Author

RIVKA GALCHEN's 2008 first novel, Atmospheric Disturbances, and her 2014 story collection, American Innovations, were both New York Times Best Books of the Year. She has received many awards, as well as an MD from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. Galchen lives in New York City.

Editorial Reviews

…a highly original book of essays and observations…Some of the essays in this volume resonate more than others…but they all made me want to keep reading, to keep listening to the subtle quality of the author's voice: her irony, smarts, unexpected associations…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…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.

The New York Times Book Review - Sarah Ruhl

01/25/2016
Galchen (Atmospheric Disturbances) brings both humor and serious inquiry to this collection of short vignettes about the curious nature of babies and the experience of becoming a mother. Her infant daughter, whom she nicknames “the puma,” a “near mute force,” imbues Galchen’s life with renewed enchantment: “So that the world seemed ludicrously, suspiciously, adverbially sodden with meaning. Which is to say that the puma again made me more like a writer.” Referencing the Japanese classic The Pillow Book, the musings of an 11th-century court lady, Galchen observes the prosaic everyday of her own life in order to uncover the wonder behind it. She also contemplates the limitations and assumptions forced on female writers of the past, such as Jane Bowles and Patricia Highsmith. Galchen includes a trove of cultural references, from television (Louie, I Love Lucy) to literature (Beloved, Anna Karenina), drawing observations from their varying representations of babies. Among her observations: Godzilla is “child-like,” and paintings of the baby Jesus have seldom borne much resemblance to actual infants.She also deconstructs strangers’ compliments on how nicely shaped her daughter’s head is. Each literary morsel is imbued with Galchen’s unique wit and charm. The book is an endearing compilation of social criticism, variously contentious, commonplace, funny, and incisive. (May)

Publishers Weekly

"This essay collection from fiction and science writer Rivka Galchen is not your mother's motherhood lit. Brief, gemlike reflections on adjusting to life under the rule of a baby daughter (called 'the puma') are interwoven with literary and historical references. It's a book that will ring both familiar and strange."

NPR - Anya Kamenetz

"As Galchen adeptly demonstrates, the pram in the hall is no longer the sombre enemy of good art—ignoring it is."

Maisonneuve - Gavin Tomson

"A book of extraordinary savour, with nearly every sentence calling for an emphatic underline. [...] Little Labors is a declaration of power in a culture where pregnant women and women with babies are cast under a cloak of invisibility until they normalize: the baby becoming autonomous, the mother less obviously attached to a source of endless vulnerability. (Galchen mentions how on I Love Lucy, the actors weren’t even allowed to utter the word “pregnant.”) Her story is a surreptitious rejection of that invisibility, claiming her own power as mother by disappearing her partner completely. In doing so, she sends her own stark message of the way mothers are often deleted from the narrative, and the sense upon finishing this tiny tome is that it is indeed very small, but not in the least bit minor."

The National Post

"Galchen's implicit proposition — that babies can be the subject of serious art, that we may coo and think simultaneously — feels surprising, even radical, in a world where motherhood and intellectualism are still placed instinctively at odds. It may be a little book, but it is not a small one."

NPR

"Little Labors has range. It contemplates both “the royalty of infants” and the uselessness of babies (compared to other animals). It’s rare to find a work of likewise small stature grow so ponderously into such an expansive, magnanimous, and living thing. Like a child — if you want — or a book with meaning."

Flavorwire - Jonathon Sturgeon

"Galchen’s sentences catch your attention and hold it with a tight fist: Delicious."

NPR - Alan Cheuse

"No training wheels, no banisters, no practice breaths, Galchen drives right in to a fantastical series of meditations, observations, mysterious epiphanies, and failures of belief brought on in a mother, presumably Galchen, caring for her infant daughter, often called "the puma." Galchen does something more profound than tackle motherhood; she utterly reinvents and reanimates the subject."

Interview Magazine - Christopher Bollen

"Galchen is an elegant and careful writer."

Slate

"Galchen is, for my money, one of the most gifted stylists writing in American English today. Her funniness is otherworldly; she is the reigning champion of litotes, or understatement for effect. Preternaturally deft, Galchen can do almost anything with next to nothing."

Los Angeles Review of Books

"To read Rivka Galchen is to enter a wonderland where the bizarre and the mundane march in unlikely lockstep."

The Washington Post - Michael Lindgren

"Little Labors offer a glimpse into an unknown future, a chance for women still unsure about children to see how their lives and minds might change."

New Republic

"Galchen has a knack for taking a thread and fraying it, so that a sentence never quite ends up where you expect."

The New Yorker - James Wood

"A brilliant young writer."

Elle

"Little Labors is a short, beguiling book about babies. About babies in art (with wrongly shaped heads), about babies in literature (rare, often monstrous), and about the arrival of a baby in author Rivka Galchen’s apartment.It is not a novel, nor a memoir, nor exactly is it an essay. It is more a wunderkabinett of baby-related curios. There are anecdotes about the effort of obtaining a passport for the baby, about homeless men’s reaction to the baby, about a mean neighbor who repeatedly asks whether the baby is abnormally large. There are lists, of authors with and without kids, and of “mother writers” which includes Elena Ferrante and Sarah Manguso, and also, “two of the most celebrated,” Karl Ove Knausgaard and Louie C.K. There are ruminations on class, taste, Godzilla, Rumpelstiltskin, the color orange, screens. It is a peculiar book, and astonishing in its effect."

Boston Globe

2016-03-08
An engaging mind offers reflections on being a mother, being a writer, and having a baby. It would be tempting to term this slim volume "singular," but Galchen herself (American Innovations, 2014, etc.) provides the inspirational template when she discusses The Pillow Book, written in Japan more than 1,000 years ago. That book "is difficult to characterize. It's not a novel and not a diary and not poems and not advice, but it has qualities of each, and would have been understood at the time as a kind of miscellany, a familiar form." Now a decidedly less familiar form, this work presents dozens of sections, some a sentence or two, none longer than a few pages, which encapsulate her experiences as her daughter matures from a newborn baby into a more mobile toddler. Or, in the author's words, "when she began to locomote, she ceased being a puma and became a chicken." She has almost invariably been referred to in the preceding pages as the puma, without sentiment but with a range and depth of feeling that has obviously transformed the author. None of this is offered as instructional about mothers and babies in general but about this particular baby and her effect on this particular mother—who had never intended to write this book. "I didn't want to write about the puma," admits Galchen. "I wanted to write about other things. Mostly because I had never been interested in babies, or in mothers….I almost hated the ‘topics.' " Many of these reflections concern the baby in art and literature and how having a baby affects the output of a writer. The author also traces the development of a feminist consciousness, as she describes herself as someone who mainly read books by men and had friends who were men, but finds that the years and personal circumstances have shifted her perspective. A talented writer delivers a miscellany about her maternal transformation.

Kirkus Reviews

"Not your mother’s motherhood lit. Brief, gemlike reflections on adjusting to life under the rule of a baby daughter (called ‘the puma’): it's a book that will ring both familiar and strange."

NPR (Best Books of the Year)

"Everything one could possibly need is dispensed via dense, tiny, mysterious pellets—a fortified shot of literary enrichment we didn't even know we needed, but that now feels vital and enthralling."

The New Republic

"Witty and delightfully intelligent. "

Los Angeles Times - Carolyn Kellogg

"A quietly revolutionary little book."

The Millions

"A highly original book: I adore Galchen's quiet and bravery. 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."

The New York Times Book Review