Rachel Ingalls

Rachel Holmes Ingalls (13 May 1940 – 6 March 2019) was an American-born author who had lived in the United Kingdom from 1965 onwards.
in ''Contemporary Authors'', New Revision Series, 2007 She won the 1970 Authors' Club First Novel Award for ''Theft''. Her novella '' Mrs. Caliban'' was published in 1982, and her book of short stories ''Times Like These'' in 2005.

Ingalls's short story "Last Act: The Madhouse" inspired the story of the character Jean in the 1997 film ''Chinese Box'' by Wayne Wang.

Biography

Ingalls was born on 13 May 1940, in Boston and grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts where her father was a professor at Harvard."The Hallucinatory Realism of Rachel Ingalls,"
''The New Yorker'', 25 February 2019. She received her B. A. degree from Radcliffe College in 1964, and immigrated to England.

She was the daughter of Phyllis (née Day) and the late Sanskritist Daniel Henry Holmes Ingalls, Sr., and the sister of the computer scientist Dan Ingalls.

Ingalls died from multiple myeloma under hospice care in London on 6 March 2019, at age 78.

Literary reputation

Ingalls' reputation is characterised by deep admiration and acclaim but also a certain degree of obscurity. She referred to her limited commercial success as being due to the ''very odd, unsalable length" of her books, which tend to be story collections or novellas. She was awarded the Authors' Club First Novel Award for her book ''Theft''. In 1986 the British Book Marketing Council named the hitherto little known ''Mrs Caliban'' as one of the 20 greatest American novels since World War II, sparking wider interest in both book and writer. Earlier praise for ''Mrs Caliban'' came from John Updike. The writer Daniel Handler is an advocate of Ingalls' work. In an overview of her work written for ''Book Post'', Joy Williams wrote, " ngallshad a keen sense of the unrealness of people and event, the questionableness at the heart of the world."

Bibliography

* ''Theft'' (1970). London: Faber.
* ''The Man Who Was Left Behind and Other Stories'' (1974). London: Faber.
* '' Mrs. Caliban'' (1982). London: Faber.
* ''Binstead's Safari'' (1983). London: Dent.
* ''Three of a Kind'' (1985). London: Faber.
* ''The Pearlkillers'' (1986). London: Faber.
* ''The End of Tragedy'' (1987). London: Faber.
* ''Four Stories'' (1987). London: Faber.
* ''Days Like Today'' (2000). London: Faber.
* ''Times Like These'' (2005). Saint Paul, Minn: Graywolf Press.
* ''Black Diamond'' (2013). London: Faber and Faber.
* ''In the act'', New York : New Directions Publishing, 2023,
* ''No love lost, selected novellas'' ; with a foreword by Patricia Lockwood, London : Faber & Faber, 2023,
In 2017 Pharos Editions published a collection of Ingalls' stories selected and introduced by Daniel Handler under the title ''Three Masquerades: Novellas'' ().

References

Further reading

* Online version is titled "The hallucinatory realism of Rachel Ingalls".

Notes

{{DEFAULTSORT:Ingalls, Rachel
1940 births
2019 deaths
20th-century American novelists
20th-century American women writers
21st-century American novelists
21st-century American women writers
American emigrants to England
American women novelists
Deaths from multiple myeloma in England
Novelists from Massachusetts
Radcliffe College alumni
Writers from Boston
Writers from Cambridge, Massachusetts
Writers from London