Sub-Rosa is a reading group that meets once a month to discuss feminist and obscure literature.
Our selection for this month is Mrs. Caliban by Rachel Ingalls.
We will meet Saturday, May 3 at 6:30 p.m. at the store.
If you are interested in attending please send us your email to bookbeatorders@gmail.com, message Book Beat on Instagram, or inquire in-store.
Books are in stock now and discounted 15%.
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.
“As deranged as the whole thing is, Ingalls’s prose, strikingly austere, taps into a profound sadness, too: Is Mrs. Caliban a work of fantasy or are we inhabiting the psyche of a woman unhinged?…Begs to be read over and over again.—The Paris Review
“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
“Rachel Ingalls has created a tight, intriguing portrait of a woman’s escape from unacceptable reality and presented an account of derangement so matter-of-fact, so ordinary and at the same time so bizarre, that through her words we experience new insight.”—The New York Times Book Review
Rachel Ingalls (1940–2019) grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and moved to London in 1965. Theft, her literary debut, won the 1970 Authors’ Club First Novel Award. Her 1982 novel, Mrs. Caliban, was named one of the twenty greatest American novels since World War II by the British Book Marketing Council. She wrote fourteen novels and short story collections, including Times Like These, Binstead’s Safari, and I See a Long Journey.