cover image of the book In the Act

Storybook ND series

Some writers make me laugh out loud; Rachel Ingalls makes me cackle.

Ed Park, The Village Voice

From Rachel Ingalls, the author of Mrs. Caliban, another delicious, highly improbable, and hilariously believable tale of a wife’s scorched-earth rebellion

Available July 4, 2023

In the Act

Fictionby Rachel Ingalls

With a contribution by Ouattara Watts

In the Act begins: “As long as Helen was attending her adult education classes twice a week, everything worked out fine: Edgar could have a completely quiet house for his work, or his thinking, or whatever it was.”

In Rachel Ingalls’s blissfully deranged novella, the “whatever it was” her husband’s been up to in his attic laboratory turns out to be inventing a new form of infidelity. Initially Helen, before she uncovers the truth, only gently tries to assert her right to be in her own home. But one morning, grapefruit is the last straw: “He read through his newspaper conscientiously, withdrawing his attention from it for only a few seconds to tell her that she hadn’t cut all the segments entirely free in his grapefruit—he’d hit exactly four that were still attached. She knew, he said, how that kind of thing annoyed him.”

While Edgar keeps his lab locked, Helen secretly has a key, and what she finds in the attic shocks her into action and propels In the Act into heights of madcap black comedy even beyond Ingalls’s usual stratosphere.

Clothbound(published July 4, 2023)

ISBN
9780811232043
Price US
17.95
Trim Size
6x9
Page Count
64

Ebook

ISBN
9780811232050
Portrait of Rachel Ingalls

Rachel Ingalls

American writer

Some writers make me laugh out loud; Rachel Ingalls makes me cackle.

Ed Park, The Village Voice

Ingalls writes fables whose unadorned sentences belie their irreducible strangeness…In her grim yet playful fashion, Ingalls is concerned with the rules and conventions by which societies are organized, the violent machinations by which they are maintained. Like a good tragedian, she tends to heap up corpses at the end of her tales, and even in her quieter examinations of familial bonds she leaves readers to wonder, of her spouses and siblings, who might push whom off a cliff.

Lidija Haas, The New Yorker