Little Labors

In paperback at last: Rivka Galchen’s beloved baby bible - slyly hilarious, surprising, and absolutely essential reading for anyone who has ever had, held, or been a baby 

In this enchanting miscellany, Rivka Galchen notes that literature has more dogs than babies (and also more abortions), that the tally of children for many great women writers - Jane Bowles, Elizabeth Bishop, Virginia Woolf, Janet Frame, Willa Cather, Patricia Highsmith, Iris Murdoch, Djuna Barnes, Mavis Gallant - is zero, that orange is the new baby pink, that The Tale of Genji has no plot but plenty of drama about paternity, that babies exude intoxicating black magic, and that a baby is a goldmine.

Little Labors is a slanted, enchanted literary miscellany. Varying in length from just a sentence or paragraph to a several-page story or essay, Galchen's puzzle pieces assemble into a shining, unpredictable, mordant picture of the ordinary-extraordinary nature of babies and literature. Anecdotal or analytic, each part opens up an odd and tender world of wonder.