Bøker av Rachel Ingalls

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.

His wasn't a world war. It was one of the smaller wars, but just as deadly as any other. "Wars are like snakes," his first commanding officer said to him. "Some of the little ones can be even worse than the monsters." --from "Veterans"Franklin fears his family is in danger from a fellow veteran he saved during the war. A young boy entranced by opera despite being born into the rock-and-roll generation finds himself playing the lead role in a present-day tragedy. Travel agents happily lost in the paperwork of other people's adventures break away for an impromptu trip without -- to their horror -- a destination. Pitch-perfect and unpredictable, these stories cover a wide terrain of voices, plot, and imagery. Rachel Ingalls's richly drawn characters slip from the ordinary into the surreal with an elegance that can only come from a master of the form. Mostly set in the United States, the stories in Times Like These are available for the first time to American readers.

The amphibious cult classic: a magical tale of a suburban housewife's affair with a frogman ...'Disturbing but seductive ... Wonderful.' Margaret Atwood'Perfect.' Max Porter'Still outpaces, out-weirds, and out-romances anything today.' Marlon James'A feminist masterpiece: tender, erotic, singular.' Carmen Maria Machado''Genius ... A broadcast from a stranger and more dazzling dimension.' Patricia Lockwood'Genius ... Like Revolutionary Road written by Franz Kafka ... Exquisite.' The Times'Incredibly liberates readers from the awfulness of convention to a state where weirdness and otherness are beautiful.' Sarah Hall'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, 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'sWhat 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 ... Will stay with me.'*****'What the hell just happened?'*****

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.

'Every volume [Rachel Ingalls] has written displays the craft of a quite remarkable talent. Tales of love, terror, betrayal and grief, which others would spin out for hundreds of pages, are given the occluded force of poetry.' Amanda Craig, IndependentRachel Ingalls (b. 1940) grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and has lived in London since 1965. The title-piece in this collection, first published in 1974, is the novella The Man Who Was Left Behind, which tells of a retired lawyer from the American South whose entire family has been destroyed. His grief drives him to haunt the bars, parks and laundromats of the town where he was once a respected citizen. The accompanying stories 'St. George and the Nighclub' and 'Something to Write Home About' are both set on the island of Rhodes, and both offer disquieting portraits of marriage.

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.

'Rachel Ingalls writes the kind of macabre, fantastic and haunting fiction called American Gothic... Its antecedents lie not in the hysterical 18th-century rebellion against reason, but in Jacobean tragedy, and in the complicated American relations with greed and Puritanism. Ingalls is one of the most brilliant practitioners of this Gothic since Poe... Black Diamond is a collection of five short stories, loosely linked by the theme of kinship. Ghoulish and gripping, they all begin in an atmosphere of unsophisticated tranquillity...' Amanda Craig, Independent'The stories in Black Diamond... wrap themselves insidiously around your curiosity, and draw you with them.' Sunday Times'[Ingalls'] vision evokes a world where psychosis and extreme violence stalk the American dream.' Time Out

'[Rachel Ingalls'] work combines subtlety and horror, magic and stark realism, Greek tragedy and happily-ever-afters. Her characters are true to life even as they embody classical archetypes - Icarus, Odysseus, Psyche, people wandering too long, striving too far, watching their loved ones by faint lights. In Days Like Today [2000], her tenth volume of fiction, Ingalls brings together five works linked by war and fate... Ranging in length from a dozen to a hundred pages, some of the pieces have the elemental focus of short stories, others the psychological depth of novels... together they constitute something rare and fine... Character is Ingalls's greatest strength... Her people are four-dimensional, rich in pasts and hopes as well as physicality. Ingalls documents truths that are stranger than fiction, and it is this that makes Days Like Today a remarkable collection.' Tobias Hill, Guardian

'Every volume [Rachel Ingalls] has written displays the craft of a quite remarkable talent. Tales of love, terror, betrayal and grief, which others would spin out for hundreds of pages, are given the occluded force of poetry.' Amanda Craig, IndependentRachel Ingalls (b. 1940) grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and has lived in London since 1965. Theft, her literary debut, won the Authors' Club First Novel Award for 1970.'Theft is a parable-parallel taking place in some dehumanizing, militarized society where Seth, a starving working man, is jailed for stealing a loaf of bread. In prison with him is a manic-messiah, a wife-killer, some affluent youngsters doing their 'mental slumming' via protest, and his protective, smarter brother-in-law.' Kirkus Review 'Imaginative and intelligent'. Sunday Times 'Tautly told with great power.' Sunday Mirror

The Pearlkillers, first published in 1986, 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. '[Rachel Ingalls'] characters all bear the mark of Cain: They are innocents (no matter that some may be killers) who are swept along through tepid, flat circumstances until suddenly all hell breaks loose, and the Furies erupt to claim their prey... In her best work, Ingalls is as monochromatic as Edgar Allan Poe, going straight to her target with the same ease and surety as an arrow skims to its bull's-eye... And just as Poe's craft was exactly suited to the conventions of the short story form, so Ingalls' vision is exactly suited to the length and scope of the novella... Like Poe, Rachel Ingalls is more than a master storyteller: She is also a superb artist.' Los Angeles Times

Academic anthropologist Stan Binstead is headed off to East Africa on sabbatical. Adulterous by nature, he's irked when his wife Millie asks to accompany him. But as the couple pass through London the balance of power in their marriage begins, strangely, to shift - a transformation that becomes yet more pronounced on safari. Sometimes considered by critics as a variation on the themes of Hemingway's 'The Short Happy Life of Francis Macombe', Binstead's Safari was first published in 1983. 'The tone of the novel deepens into a psychological study of these two people and the subtle and complex ways in which the exotic environment works upon each of them... Ingalls' style maintains the wry grace of a sophisticated romance, a control guaranteeing that the denouement will not only be inevitable but astonishing.' Elaine Kendall, Los Angeles Times