The princess kisses him, he remains a frog - a hot frog, but a frog nonetheless. It's a slinky, potent, quite unexpected sex appeal. His most dominant quality, though, is not a moistness of skin, or a 'not easy being green' attitude. Ingalls assigns the amphibian home invader a drolly casual name, Larry. Dorothy Caliban, too, is a suburban matron of the nondescript variety, living in a neat house on a quiet street, lost and purposeless, stuck in a bad marriage to an unfaithful businessman.īook Reviews 'Lady Killers:' Cherchez La Femme Fatale The tone recalls Richard Matheson's genre classic, I Am Legend, in which vampires lurk as neighbors in a ragingly nondescript southern California suburb. Caliban takes its name from the 'mooncalf' in Shakespeare's The Tempest, 'not honored with a human shape.' Ingalls gives us an odd parable of a story, totally fantastic but relayed in a matter-of-fact manner, 'drolly casual,' as John Updike described it in the single critical notice the book received upon its initial publication. Le Guin, Joyce Carol Oates, and Eleanor Catton may help this thrice-born baby to survive and thrive. Praise from heavy-hitters such as Ursula K. Caliban is being reissued, a timely resurrection in this gender-mesmerized time, given the author's proto-feminist take on life. Personally, I'm a sucker for any kind of literary archaeology that unearths classics from the past. Caliban was briefly rescued by an unlikely deus ex machina: The British Book Marketing Council, which in 1986 named it 'one of the 20 greatest American novels since World War II.' Its 15 minutes in the public eye ended quickly enough, and this strange, unlikely fable once again sank into obscurity. Originally published in 1983 and seemingly doomed to a dead end ride on the oblivion express, Mrs. Caliban, a peculiar but wonderful and long-overlooked novella by Rachel Ingalls.

This season's secret weapon in literary cocktail banter will be Mrs. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Caliban Author Rachel Ingalls and Rivka Galchen Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Mrs.

Mrs caliban