| Shirley Jackson: Novels and Stories (The Lottery / The Haunting of Hill House / We Have Always Lived in the Castle) |  | Author: Shirley Jackson
Creator: Joyce Carol Oates
Publisher: Library of America
Category: Book
List Price: $35.00
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Rating:  3 reviews
Sales Rank: 2,327
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 832
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.3 x 1.1
ISBN: 1598530720
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9781598530728
ASIN: 1598530720
Publication Date: May 27, 2010
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
"The world of Shirley Jackson is eerie and unforgettable," writes A. M. Homes. "It is a place where things are not what they seem; even on a morning that is sunny and clear there is always the threat of darkness looming, of things taking a turn for the worse." Jackson's characters-mostly unloved daughters in search of a home, a career, a family of their own-chase what appears to be a harmless dream until, without warning, it turns on its heel to seize them by the throat. We are moved by these characters' dreams, for they are the dreams of love and acceptance shared by us all. We are shocked when their dreams become nightmares, and terrified by Jackson's suggestion that there are unseen powers-"demons" both subconscious and supernatural-malevolently conspiring against human happiness.
In this volume Joyce Carol Oates, our leading practitioner of the contemporary Gothic, presents the essential works of Shirley Jackson, the novels and stories that, from the early 1940s through the mid-1960s, wittily remade the genre of psychological horror for an alienated, postwar America. She opens with The Lottery (1949), Jackson's only collection of short fiction, whose disquieting title story-one of the most widely anthologized tales of the 20th century-has entered American folklore. Also among these early works are "The Daemon Lover," a story Oates praises as "deeper, more mysterious, and more disturbing than 'The Lottery,' " and "Charles," the hilarious sketch that launched Jackson's secondary career as a domestic humorist. Here too are Jackson's masterly short novels: The Haunting of Hill House (1959), the tale of an achingly empathetic young woman chosen by a haunted house to be its new tenant, and We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962), the unrepentant confessions of Miss Merricat Blackwood, a cunning adolescent who has gone to quite unusual lengths to preserve her ideal of family happiness. Rounding out the volume are 21 other stories and sketches that showcase Jackson in all her many modes, and the essay "Biography of a Story," Jackson's acidly funny account of the public reception of "The Lottery," which provoked more mail from readers of The New Yorker than any contribution before or since.
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| Customer Reviews:
Now You're IT! June 21, 2010
Sacramento Book Review (Sacramento, CA)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
Lovers of Stephen King, Joyce Carol Oates, and Alfred Hitchcock will find much to admire in Shirley Jackson's deft portrait of psychopathology in //We Have Always Lived in the Castle//. Two sisters, suspected by villagers of murdering their entire family, live in isolation in a splendid manor. Their lives take a further turn for the macabre when a long-lost cousin disrupts their idyll. In the second of the two complete novels collected here, ghosts in //The Haunting of Hill House//, lead a young woman researching psychic phenomena at Hill House to a curious, abrupt fate.
These novels keep company in this compact Library of America edition with dozens of short stories written in clear, hypnotic prose. Whether it's villagers gathering on the town green for a lottery, a New York street corner where a housewife's nerves snap, a cocktail party with an ominously prescient teenager in the kitchen, or a char woman's simple wheedling, the settings are ordinary, but nothing else is quite what it seems: Middle-class American games at mid-century veer unexpectedly into cruelty, insanity and murder, just when it's your turn to be "it."
Reviewed by Zara Raab
A Master Storyteller gets her Due June 11, 2010
rndkr (USA)
16 out of 16 found this review helpful
A few years ago I read a review of an anthology of short stories in which a story by Joyce Carol Oates was praised as "a study of loneliness worthy of Shirley Jackson." For that and many other reasons how apropos that it's Oates herself who has compiled the contents of this very welcome volume, which features Jackson's three best books in their entirety: her 1949 collection The Lottery and Other Stories, and her classic novels The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Not only that, but a bumper crop of 22 of her other short stories are included as well, some of which are among her very best: "One Ordinary day, With Peanuts," "A Visit, or The Lovely House," "The Summer People," "I Know Who I Love," and "The Bus." Jackson's been my favorite author since I was a teen, and I've been really happy to see her literary rep growing again in recent years; I'm hoping this volume might do well enough that The Library of America might release a companion volume collecting her four other novels: The Road Through the Wall, The Bird's Nest, The Sundial, and my favorite of the bunch, the underrated bildungsroman, Hangsaman (I'd also throw in her book of very funny family stories, Life Among the Savages, as well as the novel she was working on at the time of her death, Come Along with Me).
At any rate what we have here is a feast of Jackson's particular brand of mystery, fear, humor, tragedy, and misanthropy, as always communicated in her clear, unmistakably Jacksonian prose, and starring such unforgettable characters as the mysterious, tragic Eleanor Vance, who goes to Hill House for a summer stay and never leaves; Mary Catherine Blackwood and her sister Constance, who together find their very peculiar happy ending in their "castle;" not to mention the nameless protagonist of "The Daemon Lover," likely whom the reviewer above was referring to with his reference to human loneliness (I would add Catherine Vincent from "I Know Who I Love" in that delineation as well); and of course the terrified Mrs. Hutchinson from Jackson's main claim to immortality, "The Lottery." There is also a veritable constellation of dreadful old bats populating these tales as antagonists, tormenting our heroines with their prudish propriety, and worse (Mrs. Montague in The Haunting of Hill House is a good example); and many, many perfectly horrible small town denizens, who play out smaller-scaled but similar versions of Jackson's famous lottery in many stories, practicing or promulgating ostracism, narrow-mindedness, racism, and just plain petty, spiteful, mean-spiritedness in general. Jackson regularly narrated the meme that human beings carry evil within them, and some of the most fearful, anxiety-provoking stories in her oeuvre disturb so because their descriptions of the sheer banality of this herd-pack mentality still ring true ("The Renegade" may yet be the cruelest of all the contes cruels I've encountered). Jackson had her lighter side as well, and in stories such as "The Night We All Had the Grippe," "Charles," and "My Life with RH Macy" her wry humor shines, though still with an almost indefinable air of something off-kilter; through light and dark, the author peered at life with a detached, slightly warped lens.
As this book clearly proves, Shirley Jackson's entire body of work exists today as an integrated whole, with a distinct vision and overall worldview that remains universal yet curiously her own; something I suppose every artist would strive for. Love this book: 5 out of 5 stars.
Jackson's two great shorter novels, with a wide-ranging selection of stories May 27, 2010
David C. Smith (New York, NY)
20 out of 25 found this review helpful
Here are the contents of The Library of America's first Shirley Jackson volume:
THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE
WE HAVE ALWAYS LIVED IN THE CASTLE
THE LOTTERY; OR, THE ADVENTURES OF JAMES HARRIS (story collection)
The Intoxicated
The Daemon Lover
Like Mother Used to Make
Trial by Combat
The Villager
My Life with R. H. Macy
The Witch
The Renegade
After You, My Dear Alphonse
Charles
Afternoon in Linen
Flower Garden
Dorothy and My Grandmother and the Sailors
Colloquy
Elizabeth
A Fine Old Firm
The Dummy
Seven Types of Ambiguity
Come Dance with Me in Ireland
Of Course
Pillar of Salt
Men with Their Big Shoes
The Tooth
Got a Letter from Jimmy
The Lottery
UNCOLLECTED STORIES
Janice
A Cauliflower in Her Hair
Behold the Child Among His Newborn Blisses
It Isn't the Money I Mind
The Third Baby's the Easiest
The Summer People
Island
The Night We All Had Grippe
A Visit; or, The Lovely House
This Is the Life; or, Journey with a Lady
One Ordinary Day, with Peanuts
Louisa, Please Come Home
The Little House
The Bus
The Possibility of Evil
UNPUBLISHED STORIES & SKETCHES
Portrait
The Mouse
I Know Who I Love
The Beautiful Stranger
The Rock
The Honeymoon of Mrs. Smith
Appendix: Biography of a Story
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