Rivka Galchen

Rivka Galchen (b. 1976) is an American-Canadian novelist, essayist, and short story writer whose work occupies a distinctive position in contemporary fiction: scientifically literate, philosophically playful, and emotionally precise, it brings the rigour of a trained physician and the speculative imagination of a Borgesian fabulist to subjects as varied as delusional psychiatry, Renaissance meteorology, seventeenth-century witch trials, and the hallucinatory experience of new motherhood. Her fiction is populated by unreliable narrators, doubles, impostors, and missing persons — figures who inhabit a reality that is always slightly out of alignment with itself — and her nonfiction has a quality of quiet intellectual wonder that transforms ordinary observations into philosophical inquiries.

Life and Career

Galchen was born in Toronto, Canada, in 1976 and raised in Norman, Oklahoma, where her father, Tzvi Galchen, was a meteorologist at the University of Oklahoma — a biographical detail that gives Atmospheric Disturbances its deep knowledge of weather systems and forecasting. She studied at Princeton University, attended medical school at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York (completing preclinical coursework), and then turned to writing, studying at Columbia University’s MFA program. The medical training left its mark: her prose has a diagnostic precision, an ability to describe states of mind with clinical exactness, that is distinctive among contemporary fiction writers.

Atmospheric Disturbances (2008, Farrar, Straus and Giroux) — her debut — is narrated by a psychiatrist, Dr. Leo Liebenstein, who becomes convinced that his wife, Rema, has been replaced by an identical impostor, and who embarks on a quest to find the “real” Rema involving a fictional Royal Academy of Meteorology and the weather-prediction theories of a Hungarian meteorologist. The novel is a bravura performance: a Capgras delusion narrative that doubles as a love story, a meteorological fable, and a meditation on the impossibility of truly knowing another person. The influences — Borges, Nabokov, W.G. Sebald — are worn lightly.

American Innovations (2014, FSG) — a short story collection — extends her range. The stories, published originally in The New Yorker, Harper’s, and elsewhere, feature narrators confronting the uncanny in everyday life: a woman whose furniture starts moving out of her apartment on its own, a narrator who encounters her own doppelgänger. The collection demonstrates Galchen’s gift for making the surreal feel mundane and the mundane feel surreal.

Little Labors (2016, New Directions) is a brief, extraordinary book — half essay, half diary, structured as a series of fragments — about the experience of new motherhood. It draws on Japanese literature (The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon), etymology, baby folklore, and the author’s own bewildered observations of her infant, whom she calls “the puma.” It is one of the finest books about early parenthood ever written, belonging to a tradition that includes Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work and Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts.

Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch (2021, FSG) — a novel based on the real-life trial of Katharina Kepler, mother of the astronomer Johannes Kepler, who was accused of witchcraft in 1615 — is her most ambitious work. Narrated in a composite voice that blends historical documents, witness testimony, and Katharina’s own stubborn, practical, darkly comic voice, the novel explores the mechanisms by which a community destroys one of its members: gossip, envy, legal procedure, and the terrifying logic of accusation.

Galchen is a regular contributor to The New Yorker, where her nonfiction — on subjects including quantum computing, weather, medical ethics, and Argentine literature — displays the same intellectual curiosity and formal inventiveness as her fiction.

Major Works and Themes

Galchen writes about perception, knowledge, and the gap between how we think the world works and how it actually works. Her fiction is drawn to states of delusion, doubling, and epistemological uncertainty — situations in which the narrator’s reality and the reader’s reality do not quite coincide. She is interested in science not as subject matter but as a way of thinking: her fiction applies the methods of hypothesis, observation, and falsification to the chaotic data of human experience.

Her prose style is dry, precise, and quietly funny — her sentences have the deadpan quality of comedy that doesn’t signal its own jokes. She is one of the few contemporary fiction writers who can write convincingly about both the emotional landscape of motherhood and the mathematical structure of weather systems.

Key Works

• Atmospheric Disturbances (2008)
• American Innovations (2014, stories)
• Little Labors (2016)
• Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch (2021)

Collecting Galchen

Rivka Galchen’s collecting market is modest but growing, driven by the critical esteem in which her work is held and the small but devoted readership that literary fiction of this calibre attracts.

Atmospheric Disturbances (2008, Farrar, Straus and Giroux) first editions bring $15–$40. Little Labors (2016, New Directions) — a slim, beautiful volume in the New Directions Pearls series — is an attractive collecting item at $10–$25. Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch (2021, FSG) is widely available at cover price. Galchen signs at literary events and New York readings. Her small but distinguished oeuvre makes a complete collection easily achievable and, for the right collector, deeply satisfying.