Rivka Galchen , a staff writer at The New Yorker , has contributed fiction and nonfiction since 2008. Her books include the novel “ Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch .”
Read more on The New Yorker →6 picks · 2008–2025
Fiction by Rivka Galchen, the author of “Atmospheric Disturbances” and “Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch”: I was raised to believe that no human is inherently evil, that evil is a surface disturbance caused by fear, misunderstanding, or ignorance. I’m now reconsidering.
The area between Times Square and Hell’s Kitchen resembles the nineteen-seventies city that’s been romanticized in the movies, Rivka Galchen writes. But do we really want to live in “Taxi Driver”?
A walkout mostly failed to secure more funding for schools, but it has spawned a movement of politically engaged Okies, Rivka Galchen writes.
I had not always been a daylight ghost, a layabout, a housewife, a person foiled by the challenge of getting dressed and someone who considered eating less…
People say no one reads anymore, but I find that’s not the case. Prisoners read. I guess they’re not given much access to computers. A felicitous injustice for me. The nicest reader letters I’ve received—also the only reader letters I’ve received—have come from prisoners. Maybe we’re all prisoners? In our lives, our habits, our relationships?
Short story, written in the first person, about a female graduate student who becomes involved with two older men who are interested in the science of time…