What could this cult sci-fi classic teach us about Shakespeare’s Caliban? Let’s find out.
Mrs Caliban by Rachel Ingalls
Thursday March 28th at 8pm on Zoom
DM us or contact christine@shakespeareintheruff.com for the Zoom link. (Don’t have time to read the book but still interested in the conversation? Join us anyway!)
Mrs Caliban is available at Queen Books (10% off with the code RUFFREADS), the Toronto Public Library, as an eBook, and an Audiobook.
From the Publisher:
Dorothy is a grieving housewife in the Californian suburbs, mourning the death of her young son and a recent miscarriage. Her husband is unfaithful, but they are too unhappy to get a divorce.
One day, she is doing chores when she hears strange voices on the radio announcing that a green-skinned sea monster has escaped from the Institute for Oceanographic Research – but little does she expect him to arrive in her kitchen.
Muscular, vegetarian, sexually magnetic and excellent at housework, Larry the frogman is a revelation – and their passionate affair takes them on a journey beyond their wildest dreams…
Rachel Ingalls’s Mrs Caliban is an amphibious cult classic – a bittersweet fable, a subversive fairy tale – as magical today as it was four decades ago.
About Rachel Ingalls:
Ingalls was born in Boston in 1940. She dropped out of school and spent time in Germany before studying at Radcliffe College and then moving to Britain in 1965, where she lived for the rest of her life. Over half a century Ingalls wrote eleven celebrated story collections and novellas. Her debut novel, Theft (1970), won the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award and her 1982 novella, Mrs Caliban, was named by the British Book Marketing Council as one of the greatest American novels since World War II – to her surprise. She died in 2019 in London.