Little Labors [Hardcover]

Galchen has a knack for taking a thread and fraying it, so that a sentence never quite ends up where you expect.Little Labors has range. It contemplates both the royalty of infants and the uselessness of babies (compared to other animals). Its 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.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.To read Rivka Galchen is to enter a wonderland where the bizarre and the mundane march in unlikely lockstep.InLittle 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.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reflections on adjusting to life under the rule of a baby daughter (called 'the puma') are interwoven with literary and historical references.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.Galchen is, for my money, one of the most gifted stylists writing inAmerican English today. Her funniness is otherworldly; she is the reigningchampion of litotes, or understatement for effect. Preternaturally deft,Galchen can do almost anything with next to nothing.As Galchen adeptly demonstrates, the pram in the hall is no longer the sombre enemy of good artignoring it is.Rivka Galchen (Galchen is an elegant and careful writer.An engaging mind offers reflections on being a mother, being a writer, and having a baby.No training wheels, no banisters, no practice breaths, Galchen drives right in to a fantastical series of meditations, observations, mysterious epiphanies, and failurelã-