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Shirley Jackson: Novels & Stories

The Lottery | The Haunting of Hill House | We Have Always Lived in the Castle | other stories and sketches More

Edited by Joyce Carol Oates

“The very welcome Library of America edition of Jackson’s work, edited by Joyce Carol Oates, contains, in addition to Hill House, 46 of her short stories. . . . Jackson wrote wonderfully at every stage of her career, but it’s the later work, from her difficult last years, that sticks most tenaciously in the imagination, stories about desperate homebound fantasies and overfamiliar fears.”—Terrence Rafferty, The New York Times Book Review

Overview
News & Views
Table of Contents

Overview

Influences The haunted house and the freedom of isolation: Nghiem Tran on how Shirley Jackson inspired his mesmeric debut
September 19, 2023

Video Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life
August 10, 2022

News Ruth Franklin: A decade of Shirley Jackson
December 17, 2020

Save $15 when you buy both Shirley Jackson volumes in a deluxe boxed set.

“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 twentieth 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.

Joyce Carol Oates, editor, has written a number of celebrated novels, including The Gravedigger’s Daughter (a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist), Blonde (a National Book Award and a Pulitzer finalist), them (winner of the National Book Award), The Falls (winner of the Prix Femina Étranger), and We Were the Mulvaneys (an Oprah’s Book Club selection). Her short fiction has been collected in more than 30 volumes, including High Lonesome: New & Selected Stories 1966–2006. She teaches fiction writing at Princeton University.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

This volume is available for adoption in the Guardian of American Letters Fund.
News & Views

Influences The haunted house and the freedom of isolation: Nghiem Tran on how Shirley Jackson inspired his mesmeric debut
September 19, 2023

Video Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life
August 10, 2022

News Ruth Franklin: A decade of Shirley Jackson
December 17, 2020

Interviews Ruth Franklin on the novels of Shirley Jackson: “She never did the same thing twice”
October 30, 2020

Story of the Week Shirley Jackson, “The Night We All Had Grippe”
April 30, 2020
Table of Contents

The Lottery; or, The Adventures of James Harris
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
Epilogue

The Haunting of Hill House

We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Other Stories and Sketches

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
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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ISBN: 978-1-59853-072-8 837 pages

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N° 204 Library of America Series

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