Times Like These

“Rachel Ingalls is a writer of true originality and strangeness…many of her short stories are works of odd, slant genius that stay in one’s mind for years.” —Katha Pollitt

His wasn’t a world war. It was one of the smaller wars, but just as deadly as any other. “Wars are like snakes,” his first commanding officer said to him. “Some of the little ones can be even worse than the monsters.” It was certainly as bad as anything Franklin had ever imagined, despite all the comforts of modern warfare: danger money, paid leave, medical care, disability compensation, and the G.I. Bill if you came out in one piece.

Franklin fears his family is in danger from a fellow veteran he saved during the war. A young boy entranced by opera despite being born into the rock-and-roll generation finds himself playing the lead roll in a present-day tragedy. Travel agents happily lost in the paperwork of other people’s adventures break away for an impromptu trip without—to their horror—a destination.

Pitch-perfect and unpredictable, these stories cover a wide terrain of voices, plot, and imagery. Ingalls’s richly drawn characters slip from the ordinary into the surreal with an elegance that can only come from a master of the form. Mostly set in the United States, the stories in Times Like These are available for the first time to American readers.

“May she soon return to this country, in fiction if not in fact.”—John Updike