![]() ![]() Dense with allusion and impervious to any consistent interpretation, her work often invites contradictory responses. Ingalls writes fables whose unadorned sentences belie their irreducible strangeness. Now her one novel-length work, “ Binstead’s Safari,” published in 1983, is being reissued by New Directions. ![]() Caliban” a wild-card entry on a list of the twenty best postwar American novels back in 1986, but only recently has she gained a broader readership that she seems likely to keep. In a rare interview, she explained her resistance to publicity as a fear of “being set up as the new arrival in the zoo.” Attention flared when the British Book Marketing Council made “Mrs. Ingalls, whose works are frequently out of print, has been unjustly neglected, and she is also constitutionally self-effacing. Caliban,” about an affair between a housewife and a green-skinned sea dweller, was conspicuous for her absence. Those who flung (unsubstantiated) allegations of plagiarism at Guillermo del Toro’s 2017 film, “ The Shape of Water,” included the maker of a recent Dutch short, the son of the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Paul Zindel, and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, who directed and co-wrote “ Delicatessen.” But Rachel Ingalls, the author of the 1982 novella “ Mrs. It’s the kind of story-a collision of fairy tale, pulp, and the dredgings of the unconscious-that produces an eerie familiarity. A lonely woman romances a large aquatic creature who’s fleeing her town’s sadistic scientists. ![]()
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