Mrs Caliban and Other Stories
Rachel IngallsThis anguished but fundamentally droll tale occupies the literary ground between Creature from the Black Lagoon & The Shape of Water. In this case, the six-foot-seven monster is Larry, & he’s really more of an amphibious lizardman than anything else. But a very polite one, with a lot of libido, good homemaking skills, a fondness for avocadoes, & a readiness to take a few risks, if in the soulfully jolly name of exploration. In short, he’s everything you’d want in a lover, except that he also kills a little too often in self-defense and isn’t particularly presentable, especially now that the cops are out looking for him. Throw in some affairs, a few beach scenes, mid-day cocktails, & ratcheting degrees of family trauma, & squeeze it all into 111 pages (plus a forward by Rivka Galchen), and, well, that’s it. — James Sturz @ Lithub
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Rachel Ingalls was born in Boston in 1940. She dropped out of school & spent time in Germany before studying at Radcliffe College & then moving to Britain in 1965, where she lived for the rest of her life. Over half a century Ingalls wrote eleven celebrated story collections & novellas, all published by Faber. Her debut novel, Theft (1970), won the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award & her 1982 novella, Mrs Caliban, was named by the British Book Marketing Council as one of the greatest American novels since World War II – to her surprise. She died in 2019 in London.