The fiction of Rachel Ingalls has haunted me for years. The plots are dramatic, even exaggerated, but the books are quiet and short. The language is plain but curious. I’ve gathered here three works of hers. Two of these are frightening and one less so, although I sometimes change my mind about which one that is. —from the Introduction by Daniel Handler Daniel Handler assembled this collection from Rachel Ingalls’ wide selection of novellas as a perfect introduction to her beguiling talent. I See a Long Journey and On Ice, novellas Mr. Handler considers basically perfect, originally appeared with a third, Blessed Art Thou, 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.
Now back in print, Mrs. Caliban is “totally unforgettable” (The New York Times Book Review) and “something of a miracle” (The New Yorker) 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.
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.
Another glorious tale of female empowerment from the author of Mrs. Caliban After getting a haircut in London and a few new outfits (“she bought two pairs of shoes and began to enjoy herself”), Millie, the neglected American wife of an academic pill, is transformed—and, upon arrival in Africa, falls into the perfect affair. Binstead’s Safari unfolds the fractured fairy tale of the rebirth of a drab, insecure woman as a fiercely alive, fearless beauty. “Life was too short to waste time trying to find excuses for not doing the things you really wanted to do,” Millie realizes, helping herself to love and joy. The husband is astonished—everyone adores the new Millie. She can’t put a foot wrong, and as they move deeper into Africa in search of lion myths for his book, “excitement and pleasure carried her upwards as on a tide.” Mysteries abound, but in the hands of Rachel Ingalls, the ultimate master of the curveball, Millie’s resurrection seems perfectly natural: caterpillar to butterfly. “Only now had she found her life”—and also her destiny, which may, this being Ingalls, take the form of a Lion God.
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.
These four bewitching novellas have the imaginative power and spellbinding inventiveness readers expect from the author whose Mrs. Caliban was named one of the 20 best postwar American novels by the British Book Marketing Council.
When Rachel Carson died of cancer in 1964, her four books, including the environmental classic Silent Spring, had made her one of the most famous people in America. This trove of previously uncollected writings is a priceless addition to our knowledge of Rachel Carson, her affinity with the natural world, and her life.
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