Mrs. Caliban - Softcover

Ingalls, Rachel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0811226697 ISBN 13: 9780811226691

Publisher: New Directions, 2017

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author:

Rachel Ingalls (1940-2019) was born in Boston and lived in the UK from 1965 until her death. She wrote the novels Mrs. Caliban and Binstead’s Safari as well as numerous novellas and short stories.

RIVKA GALCHEN's 2008 first novel, Atmospheric Disturbances, and her 2014 story collection, American Innovations, were both New York Times Best Books of the Year. She has received many awards, as well as an MD from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. Galchen lives in New York City.

Review:

“A masterpiece and totally off the wall.”
- Electric Literature

“It's not just Disney that can ruminate on romance between a beauty and a beast. In this reissue of Rachel Ingalls' 1982 novel, housewife Dorothy hears on the radio that a potentially dangerous monster has just escaped a research facility. But when the creature walks through her door, he awakens something new in her. This is our pick for feminist social satire that's deliciously weird.”
- Estelle Tang, Elle

“Indeed, as a feminist piece with a deep romantic core, that might best explain Mrs. Caliban’s ability to emerge as an unlikely literary classic. There’s the sheer entertainment factor ― steamy Aquaman sex, anyone?―but then just underneath is a real depth, a quiet brilliance in its study of behavior and circumstance. It cuts through the noise, enlightening while also resonating, soothing in its dreamy surrealism. And isn’t that the perfect recipe for an enduring classic?”
- David Canfield, EW

“Thirty-five years old, it is fresher than most things written yesterday. I wish I could say that I have always known about it. Instead I confess to the zeal of a new convert. Every one of its 125 pages is perfect, original, and arresting. Clear a Saturday, please, and read it in a single sitting.”
- Christine Smallwood, Harper's Magazine

“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.”
- Independent

“The love story is a delight, the social commentary sharp, the writing funny and fun―and yet the sorrow, even bitterness, at the core of this book about our perfidious species is inescapable and profound.”
- Kirkus (starred review)

“[A] slim surrealist masterpiece.”
- LA Times

“By marrying domestic realism with the literature of the bizarre, Ingalls brings tenderness to the monstrous and renders the recognizable utterly weird. Compact yet capacious, the novel wonders at all the ways we can desire and destroy one another. It’s unabashedly campy and deadly serious; it dares the reader to admit that these aims are not at all at odds.”
- Literary Hub

“A love affair with a 6-foot-7-inch amphibian might not be every woman’s fantasy, but for Dorothy―the lonely housewife at the center of this soon-to-be-reissued 1982 novel―it’s working out just fine. A short, funny, bizarre novel that’s worth your time.”
- Los Angeles Magazine

“Perhaps Ingalls’s finest accomplishment in the novel is the unflappable gentleness of her tone, which records supernatural surprise and flaming horror simply, almost tranquilly. The result is paradoxically quotidian and dreamlike, like a fable or folktale.”
- Rob Latham, Los Angeles Review of Books

About this edition

• Publisher: New Directions
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 0811226697
• ISBN 13: 9780811226691
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 128