Rachel Ingalls

In the quiet suburbs, while Dorothy is doing chores and waiting for her husband to come home from work, not in the least anticipating romance, she hears a strange radio announcement about a monster who has just escaped from the Institute for Oceanographic Research... Reviewers have compared Rachel Ingalls's Mrs. Caliban to King Kong, Edgar Allan Poe's stories, the films of David Lynch, Beauty and the Beast, The Wizard of Oz, E.T., Richard Yates's domestic realism, B-horror movies, and the fairy tales of Angela Carter--how such a short novel could contain all of these disparate elements is a testament to its startling and singular charm.

Mrs. Caliban

From Rachel Ingalls, the author of Mrs. Caliban, another delicious, highly improbable, and hilariously believable tale of a wife’s scorched-earth rebellion In the Act begins: “As long as Helen was attending her adult education classes twice a week, everything worked out fine: Edgar could have a completely quiet house for his work, or his thinking, or whatever it was.” In Rachel Ingall’s blissfully deranged novella, the “whatever it was” her husband’s been up to in his attic laboratory turns out to be inventing a new form of infidelity. Initially Helen, before she uncovers the truth, only gently tries to assert her right to be in her own home. But one morning, grapefruit is the last straw: “He read through his newspaper conscientiously, withdrawing his attention from it for only a few seconds to tell her that she hadn’t cut all the segments entirely free in his grapefruit—he’d hit exactly four that were still attached. She knew, he said, how that kind of thing annoyed him.” While Edgar keeps his lab locked, Helen secretly has a key, and what she finds in the attic shocks her into action and propels In the Act into heights of madcap black comedy even beyond Ingalls’s usual stratosphere.

In the Act

Bayan Caliban

Binstead's Safari

New Englanders Millie and Stan Binstead experience dramatic psychological changes while on an African safari, touching off a chain of events that results in infidelity and death

A Novel

I See a Long Journey and On Ice, novellas Mr. Handler considers basically perfect, originally appeared with a third, Blessed Art Though, a story he considers to be in an entirely different tone. He felt that Friends in the Country from Ms. Ingalls later collection, THE END OF TRAGEDY, was a more natural companion to the two earlier works. The author happily agreed.I See a Long Journey introduces us to Flora who is induced by her husband, James, to take a vacation only because his chauffeur Michael, custodian of their persons and their purse, will accompany them. Things, as they so often do in Ingalls world, will go appalling awry.Friends in the Country wherein a young couple drive outside of London for a Friday dinner and find themselves trapped for the weekend in a manner that surpasses Stephen King, if not in outright horror then certainly in subtlety and suggestiveness.On Ice finds Beverley with her fiancé at an elegant hotel where she is introduced to a grande dame whose funeral Beverleys convinced she had witnessed 10 years before.

Three Masquerades

The Selected Novellas of Rachel Ingalls

No Love Lost

'I loved Mrs Caliban. So deft and austere in its prose, so drolly casual in its fantasy...' John Updike First published in 1982, Mrs Caliban was in 1986 selected by the British Book Marketing Council as one of the 20 best post-war American novels. 'Ingalls takes a B-movie premise (aquatic humanoid escapes from lab) and pounds it into a thrilling new shape - a vehicle for social satire, kitchen-sink realism, surreal domesticity, and just plain blood-curdling screams. The book deals with incest and insanity, curtailed feminine social spheres and the Other; horrific violence and a palpable sadness saturate the pages.' Ed Park, Village Voice This volume also includes two story collections, Three of a Kind and The End of Tragedy, so making a tremendous primer in the subtle prose style and fabulist force of Rachel Ingalls.

Mrs Caliban and other stories

Irenosen Okojie

The amphibious cult classic: a magical tale of a housewife's affair with a frogman ... 'Still outpaces, out-weirds, and out-romances anything today.' Marlon James ''Genius ... A broadcast from a stranger and more dazzling dimension.' Patricia Lockwood 'So curiously right, so romantically obverse, that it creates its own terrible, brilliant reality.' Sarah Hall 'A feminist masterpiece: tender, erotic, singular.' Carmen Maria Machado 'A devastating fable of mythic proportions ... Wondrously peculiar.' Irenosen Okojie (foreword) Dorothy is a grieving housewife in the Californian suburbs; her husband is unfaithful, but they are too unhappy to get a divorce. One day, she is doing chores when she hears strange voices on the radio announcing that a green-skinned sea monster has escaped from the Institute for Oceanographic Research - but little does she expect him to arrive in her kitchen. Muscular, vegetarian, sexually magnetic and excellent at housework, Larry the frogman is a revelation - and their passionate affair takes them on a journey beyond their wildest dreams ... Rachel Ingalls's Mrs Caliban is a bittersweet fable, a subversive fairy tale, as magical today as it was four decades ago 'A miracle . A perfect novel.' New Yorker 'Every one of its 125 pages is perfect ... Clear a Saturday, please, and read it in a single sitting.' Harper's What Readers Are Saying: 'Maybe the most gorgeous, lyrical book ever written'***** 'A fantastic wee novel, strange and brilliant, and absolutely the inspiration for The Shape of Water.'***** 'Wonderful, sharp minimal prose offers big truths. Superb - brilliant, in fact.'***** 'Absolutely incredible. It's weird, funny, and heartbreaking, like a Richard Yates novel except with lizardman sex.'***** 'One of the best tongue-in-cheek social satires that I've ever read. It delves into gender politics. It takes a long, hard look at mental health. It addresses female sexual freedom and agency. It asks the reader to examine what it means to be human ... Genius.'***** 'Really brilliant: a deconstruction of suburbia by way of monster movies that examines sad realities with hilarious verve ... Sometimes you need a sexy frog person to break you out of the ties that bind. '***** 'Hooked me so deeply I picked it up and finished it the same night ... Beautiful, with some air of tragedy that left me surprised and craving more ... Will stay with me.'***** 'What the hell just happened?'*****

Mrs Caliban (Faber Editions)

This is a collection of four novellas: 'Third Time Lucky', 'People to People', 'Captain Hendrik's Story', and 'Inheritance', the action of which gives the volume its title.

The Pearlkillers

Four novellas include "Third Time Lucky," in which a twice-widowed woman's third husband dies, "People to People," a suspenseful story of five college buddies who share a legacy of murder, and two others

Rachel Ingalls

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