Rivka Galchen Books in Order

Rivka Galchen was born in Toronto and grew up in Norman, Oklahoma, after her parents moved from Israel to the United States. Her father was a meteorology professor, her mother worked as a computer programmer at the National Severe Storms Laboratory, and science, weather, and immigrant family life all became part of the background music of her work.

She went to Princeton, then earned an M.D. from Mount Sinai School of Medicine. During that stretch she also spent time in South America doing public health work. Later she completed an MFA at Columbia, where she had already been writing seriously for years.

Writing came first, even when she was taking the practical route.

Galchen has said that she went to medical school less from a clean love of medicine than from duty, and from wanting a stable profession that made sense to her family. While she was in school, she kept writing and slowly realized that medicine was turning her into a detached, unhappy version of herself. By the time she finished, she knew she did not want to be a clinician, and she headed straight toward fiction instead.

That detour matters.

Her first novel, Atmospheric Disturbances, came out in 2008. It follows a psychiatrist, Leo Liebenstein, who becomes convinced that his wife has been replaced by an exact double. The book is odd, funny, sad, and very precise about the ways the mind can protect itself by making reality stranger. You can feel Galchen's interest in science there, but also her interest in love, self-deception, and the stories people build to survive.

She kept pushing that mix of the everyday and the impossible. In American Innovations, her story collection, furniture walks away, errands go wrong, and ordinary domestic life starts behaving by dream logic. Readers who like Galchen often like that she never treats the bizarre as a gimmick. Her work stays emotionally grounded, even when the facts on the page seem to wobble.

Then she changed registers again. Little Labors is a small, sharp book about babies, literature, and the warped time of early motherhood. It is funny in the dry Galchen way, but it is also tender and a little bewildered, which feels true to the subject. A few years later, Rat Rule 79 brought that same curiosity to younger readers, sending a girl named Fred into a fantasy world where time is outlawed and growing up becomes the central problem.

Her 2021 novel, Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch, turns to seventeenth-century Germany and the real case of Katherina Kepler, the mother of Johannes Kepler. The historical setting is different, but the questions are familiar: how communities decide what is true, how fear spreads, how women get watched, and how a person keeps her wit when other people have already decided what she is.

Across fiction and nonfiction, Galchen returns to unstable identities, skewed logic, science and superstition, family tension, and the comedy tucked inside serious situations. She is also a longtime staff writer at The New Yorker, and she teaches writing at Columbia. Over the years she has received honors including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe award, the Berlin Prize, and the William Saroyan International Prize in Fiction. She lives in New York City.