Rivka Galchen’s fiction and essays have appeared in Zoetrope, Harper’s, the New Yorker, Scientific American, and the New York Times. Her first novel, Atmospheric Disturbances, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2008.
Stendhal dedicates The Charterhouse of Parma to “the happy few,” a reference to a speech in Shakespeare’s Henry V in which the happy few are men lucky enough to be profoundly outnumbered in a battle. So Stendhal’s dedication is to…