Keynote
“Ingalls is one of the greatest short story writers we have. She is the real thing.”—The Times
Book Title
Times Like These
Cover Image
- “Filled with surprising plot twists, guided by the frequent interventions of the deus ex machina that arises from the author’s imagination, they keep us steadily turning the pages.”—Washington Post Book World
Body
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 role 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.
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 role 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.
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About the Author
Praise
- “Thrilling and horrific.”—Salon.com, Top 10 books of 2005
- “An unmooring vision of hell that rises just as your defenses go down.”—Village Voice, Top Shelf 2005
- “She’s an American original.”—Seattle Times
- “Ingalls’ craft is in synthesizing a lifetime of human experience into chilling tableaux of memory, grief, madness, recovery, passion, regret and horror.”—San Francisco Chronicle
