Description
Book SynopsisFrom Rachel Ingalls, the author of
Mrs. Caliban, another delicious, highly improbable, and hilariously believable tale of a wife’s scorched-earth rebellion
Trade Review"Ingalls writes fables whose unadorned sentences belie their irreducible strangeness. In her grim yet playful fashion, Ingalls is concerned with the rules and conventions by which societies are organized, the violent machinations by which they are maintained. Like a good tragedian, she tends to heap up corpses at the end of her tales, and even in her quieter examinations of familial bonds she leaves readers to wonder, of her spouses and siblings, who might push whom off a cliff." -- Lidija Haas - The New Yorker
"Some writers make me laugh out loud; Rachel Ingalls makes me cackle." -- Ed Park - Village Voice
"Her best stories remain freshly startling." -- Joy Williams
"Ingalls artfully weaves B-movie kitsch into the already eerie afternoons of airless domesticity. In her work, sexual desire often crawls onto the bare shores of women’s lives — a friendly alien, if you can get past its unusual guises." -- Audrey Wollen - The New York Times
"Witty, darkly comedic…No one straddles the line between playful and macabre quite like Ingalls." -- Sophia Stewart - The Millions
"Much of Ingalls’ fiction deals with the depressive realities of marriage and the frightening disregard, ambivalence or pure hatred husbands have for wives.
In the Act is a funny story, well in line with the rest of the author’s vision." -- Jessica Ferri - Los Angeles Times
"Best remembered for her incursions into the otherworldly, Ingalls’s faculties reach their zenith in her unsparing dissections of domestic disenchantment. … In Ingalls’s free-market take on Bluebeard, the fruit of female knowledge is neither damnation nor self-determination, but leverage." -- Jamie Hood - The Baffler
"[T]he single strongest current running through Rachel Ingalls’s fiction is the boundary-shattering energy of female desire, which, whether satisfied or denied, she depicts as both a life-giving force and a destroyer of worlds.... Ingalls reminds her readers that desire is weird, surprising, uncontrollable, likely to end badly—and worth pursuing nonetheless." -- Lily Meyers - The New York Review of Books
