Art at the Athenaeum

Rivka Galchen reads from her acclaimed novel, Atmospheric Disturbances

September 19th through September 19th, 2008

Novelist, Rivka Galchen, To Read and Discuss Her Celebrated First Novel, Atmospheric Disturbances, At Special Event In Fredericksburg Virginia, September 19, 2008.

Rivka Galchen, whose first novel, Atmospheric Disturbances, has been lauded in major reviews by both the New Yorker magazine and The New York Times Sunday Book Review, will read and discuss the work at a special event, Friday, September 19th, at The Wounded Bookshop in downtown historic Fredericksburg, Virginia, fifty miles south of Washington, DC.

The event is sponsored by The Fredericksburg Athenaeum, a nonprofit society operating in support of the arts and letters. Ms. Galchen's event is to take place as a partner event to the first ever Rappahannock Independent Film Festival (RIFF08- more info at: www.rifilmfestival.com) - which will take place September 18 - 21, 2008 and is also sponsored by the Athenaeum.

Event Details:
Where: The Wounded Bookshop, 109 Amelia Street, Fredericksburg, VA 22401 - 540-373-1311
When: Friday, September 19th, 7:30 PM
What: A public reading and book-signing of "Atmospheric Disturbances," a novel by Rivka Galchen.
Free and open to the public.

Notable Media Notices: see links below

New Yorker Review:
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2008/06/23/080623crbo_books_wood

New York Time Review:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/13/books/review/Schillinger-t.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=galchen&st=cse&oref=slogin

Press Note below provided by FSG publicist Matt Kaye

ATMOSPHERIC
DISTURBANCES
A NOVEL

by RIVKA GALCHEN


“We are all afflicted at times with the cataracts of the quotidian, where routine clouds our ability to notice what we once loved about the person we live with—this is the novel’s universal appeal. But it is a measure of Galchen’s courage as a novelist that she insists on leading the reader to the universal only through the singular. . . Galchen has written an original and sometimes affecting novel, one that knows how to move from the comic to the painful, as the antic twilight of Leo’s insanity gives way to the darkest night. Perhaps the novel’s most annihilating sentence is this one: ‘So I hung up the telephone, not listening to whatever it was the double was saying to me, probably just listing more memories.’ Recited memories are what a marriage has, and behind the flippant cruelty of Leo’s madness we can hear a wife trying to coax a husband back to shared normality, back to a marriage that once was, back to ‘a consensus view of reality.’”
—James Wood, The New Yorker


“A universal tale about human perception and the evolution of relationships. Readers will need to decide for themselves whether Leo has lost his mind, or is just lost in love.”—Dallas Morning News


“The sick, cerebral thrill of ATMOSPHERIC DISTURBANCES, a dense, fractually complex first novel by the conspicuously talented Rivka Galchen, lies in watching a shrink, one of the trusted guardians of consensus reality, drift out of his lane and into oncoming traffic.”—Time


“Achingly beautiful . . . ‘A-’”—Entertainment Weekly


“This sounds weird, of course, and it is—deliciously so—but on another level, it's common: After all, lots of people eventually conclude that their spouse isn't the person they once married. What husband, in a petty moment, hasn't shared Leo's cruel appraisal: ‘It would seem Rema was being played by someone older, or who at least looked older. Someone pretty, but not as pretty.’ What Galchen has done is play out that sad realization in the mind of a psychotic psychiatrist, a man thoroughly versed in others'; delusions but unable to perceive his own . . . But just when the joke seems to have played out, when we've comfortably distanced ourselves from this ridiculous man, Galchen concludes with Leo's quiet, heartbreaking plan for the future. After all his craziness, it's a startling reminder of how ordinary his case is. How many perfectly sane people trudge along, hoping they can learn to love the stranger in the house—or find the person they married?”—Ron Charles, Washington Post Book World


“As in some of Paul Auster’s most mind bending, early fiction, ATMOSPHERIC DISTURBANCES brilliantly raises more questions than it answers. If anything, we know even less when it’s all over than we did when we started. But Galchen is no Paul Auster nor is she meant to be—she might be even better.”—The Believer

“In her first novel, ATMOSPHERIC DISTURBANCES, Rivka Galchen is clearly tuned, preternaturally, to the key of Auster, Borges, and perhaps Sebald. Multiple alternate worlds whistle between these lines; characters are loose in their signifiers; things—people, places, identities—appear and disappear in a sort of weird, really smart, obsessive way that is by turns rueful, paranoid, melancholy, clever, and anxious. Indeed, the sentences and situations are endlessly variable, like a Rubik’s cube. If they seem, sometimes, to be turning slightly more from a love of perpetual motion than from any sort of urgency, that may be in Galchen’s favor. This is her sound; this is her way of moving—the girl can’t help it.”—Bookforum


“A middle-aged New York psychiatrist is convinces his young wife has been replaced by a doppelganger and enlists a patient who believes he’s a secret agent who can control the weather to help find his ‘real’ spouse’ in Galchen’s bizarre, deadpan novel about cracking up.”—Details


“ATMOSPHERIC DISTURBANCES, in the end, is everything a novel ought to be: it’s about a very specific and captivating life, and it’s about life in the deepest and most expansive of senses. It is at once a microscope and a telescope, a close-up and a panorama. It is about very big things (love, weather, chance) without ever ignoring the specific or the routine. Like Murakami, Galchen seems equally interested and invested in presenting ‘common’ people awash in the extraordinary, and eccentric people who are wholly familiar.”—The L Magazine


“You trust your shrink. You love your shrink. Which is why you start this fabulously bizarre mystery believing psychiatrist Leo Liebenstein isn't crazy when he says his wife has vanished and has been replaced by an exact replica. Or at least he thinks it's a replica-he also thinks an organization called the Royal Academy of Meteorology might be involved. No matter. Galchen's dark and comical mystery is a clever take on the ways love, longing, and overanalysis can drive you absolutely nuts.”—Marie Claire


“Enthralling.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)


“Funny, sad, and ingenious . . . Witty, tender, and conceptually dazzling.”
—Booklist (starred review)


“Assured . . . Intricate . . . Superb.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)


“Astonishing . . . Rich . . . Brilliant.”—Library Journal (starred review)





About the Author


Rivka Galchen, the daughter of Israeli immigrants, grew up in Norman, Oklahoma, where her father was a professor of meteorology and her mother worked for the National Severe Storms Laboratory. The only English language books in her house were a collection of fifty short stories from which her mother had learned English, and annual editions of J. K Lasser’s guide to income tax. She spent most of her childhood watching Doctor Who, Three’s Company, The Twilight Zone, and The Rockford Files.

Galchen’s father, who (in a way) appears in the novel, died unexpectedly of a heart attack a few weeks into her freshman year at Princeton. Over the next few years she became a hungry reader, attracted especially to anything she had ever received the impression that her father had liked, from Don Quixote to anything by Bertrand Russell to absolutely anything by a Russian. She went to medical school to make her mother happy. During her studies she spent a year doing public-health research in South America, and she completed her MD at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in 2003, having devoted her elective time to psychiatric rotations.

Galchen was then offered a Robert Bingham fellowship to study in the MFA program at Columbia University, where her husband was pursuing a PhD in computer science. She moved into the Morningside Heights neighborhood in New York City, where her parents had lived when they had first moved to the United States. While studying and teaching undergraduates in the university writing program, she began regularly spending her mornings writing at the Hungarian Pastry Shop. “Oh, here,” her mother said. “Yes, your father was here every day. He spent half our money on cake.”

After graduating from Columbia, she received a Rona Jaffe fellowship in fiction. Her often science-steeped fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Zoetrope, Open City, and BOMB, and her nonfiction has appeared or is forthcoming in The Believer, Scientific American, Harper’s Magazine, and The New York Times.

Her dog is a gentle ninety pounds.
















For more information or to set up an interview, please contact
Matt Kaye, Senior Publicist, at 212-206-5306 or HYPERLINK "mailto:matt.kaye@fsgbooks.com" matt.kaye@fsgbooks.com.
ATMOSPHERIC DISTURBANCES, by Rivka Galchen, will be published in hardcover by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on June 3, 2008 (ISBN-13: 978-0-374-20011-4; ISBN-10: 0-374-20011-4; $24.00).

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