Mrs Caliban - Hardcover

Ingalls, Rachel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0876451121 ISBN 13: 9780876451120

Publisher: Harvard Common Pr, 1997

Synopsis

I loved Mrs. Caliban. So deft and austere in its prose, so drolly casual in its fantasy...— John Updike

About this title

About the Author:

Rachel Ingalls is an American-born author who has lived in the UK since 1965. She is the author of the novels Mrs. Caliban and Binstead’s Safari as well as numerous novellas and short stories.

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

“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

“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

About this edition

• Publisher: Harvard Common Pr
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0876451121
• ISBN 13: 9780876451120
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 128