Rachel Ingalls – författare

In this collection of five stories by a great short story writer, prototypes from the ancient world cast a shadow over our age. Cupid and Psyche, Penelope, Oedipus, Icarus and Odysseus inhabit the consciousness of characters who wrestle with betrayal, sacrifice, family conflict and war. Each story poses the same questions: what do people really believe in, where can they put their trust, and why do they continue to hope? Days Like Today is a stunning volume by a true artist and a quite remarkable talent.

'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

'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.

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

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

This collection of stories is from the author of Theft, The Man Who Was Left Behind, Mrs Caliban, Three of a Kind, The Pearkillers and The End of Tragedy.'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

The amphibious cult classic: this magical tale of a suburban housewife's affair with a frogman is 'seductive' (Margaret Atwood), 'genius' (Patricia Lockwood), 'perfect' (Max Porter), 'a feminist masterpiece' (Carmen Maria Machado), and 'out-weirds and out-romances anything today' (Marlon James).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 perfect novel.' New YorkerWhat 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 asks the reader to examine what it means to be human ... Genius.'*****'Really brilliant: a deconstruction of suburbia by way of monster movies ... 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.'*****'What the hell just happened?'*****

Introduced by Patricia Lockwood: Gothic tales from the mistress of the weird behind frogman-romance Mrs Caliban for fans of Shirley Jackson, Lucia Berlin and Patricia Highsmith.'Wonderful.' Margaret Atwood'Genius.' Patricia Lockwood'Remarkable.' Joseph Heller'Perfect.' Max Porter''Immensely skillful'. Ursula K. Le Guin'Tender, erotic, singular.' Carmen Maria Machado'Still outpaces, out-weirds, and out-romances anything today.' Marlon James'One of the greatest short story writers we have.' The Times'You are in masterly hands as Ingalls lures you into a swamp of violence and magic.' Sunday TimesAfter a one-night-stand with the Angel Gabriel, a monk is transformed into a pregnant woman.Lost in the fog, two visitors are lured into a ruined candlelit mansion.A wife confiscates her husband's homemade sex doll, only to demand her own.Great-aunts warn of the deadly skin of the pearlkillers.Rachel Ingalls' incomparable novellas are masterpieces: surrealist, subversive, tragicomic. Prepare to meet what lurks beneath .'Macabre, fantastic and haunting . . . One of the most brilliant practitioners of American Gothic since Poe . . . Read her at your peril.' Independent'Fables whose unadorned sentences belie their irreducible strangeness . . . In her vision of intimacy and interdependence, you're simply not safe until everybody else is dead . . . Brilliant.' New Yorker'Resists definition . . . Her work combines subtlety and horror, magic and stark realism, Greek tragedy and happily-ever-afters . . . Rare and fine. ' Guardian'Idiosyncratic, haunting, masterly . . . A modern fabulist making myths which explode into strangeness.' Observer

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.

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.