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The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson

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I have an MFA in short fiction and don’t do a damn thing with it. But I love a good collection of short stories that teach me something about craft. Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery and Other Stories taught me the art of the ominous subtext. Jackson’s stories feature a lot of isolated or lonely people, who decidedly don’t get their happy endings. There is a dread running underneath (and sometimes overrneath…) her stories. Mundane details can say something about the character or the atmosphere. In […]

…perhaps, vehicle for every kind of fear, she contained enough for all.

The Hauting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

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Here is where I admit to relegating Shirley Jackson to a middle school English reading requirement.  I have hazy memories of reading The Lottery and thinking it was super creepy but not much more than that. I know, I know. Just wanted to start with a little honesty here. The only reason that I FINALLY grabbed a Jackson book from the library was that I fell completely in love with The Haunting of Hill House adaptation on Netflix. Not to make this a tv review, […]

Shirley Jackson Stuff – Shirley Jackson

Letters of Shirley Jackson by Shirley Jackson

The Bird's Nest by Shirley Jackson

Hangsaman by Shirley Jackson

The Sundial by Shirley Jackson

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Letters of Shirley Jackson – 5/5 Stars A few years ago I read the Collected Letters of Ralph Ellison. One of the very many exciting things about this collection was my learning that he was close friends with Stanley Edgar Hymen and by extention Shirley Jackson. This leads to some various exchanges in that collection that show just how generous of spirit Ralph Ellison often was (and how petty he could sometimes go). This collection has the same set of joys as that colleciton but […]

The smell of hospitals in winter And the feeling that it’s all a lot of oysters

The Road through the Wall by Shirley Jackson

Selected Prose of TS Eliot by TS Eliot

The Burden of Southern History by C Vann Woodward

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The Road through the Wall A novel that reminds me of what I’ve always known, that American suburbs are deeply rotten states. Shirley Jackson earned her fame by writing about small towns, but this novel published around the same time of the The Lottery story collection is a reminder, along with most of those stories, that all parts of the US have a deep cultural rot to them that is not housed in specific places. Those places just have their own flavors. The novel takes […]

Who’s the Crazy One Here?

Hangsaman by Shirley Jackson

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Hangsaman, with its odd title and even odder plot, feels like a close approximation of what it actually must be like to be insane. In free indirect discourse, Jackson takes the reader into the mind of 17-year-old Natalie Waite as she leaves home for the first time and starts studying at an all-girls college. Natalie is a creative, lonely girl with a domineering writer for a father and a mother who burdens Natalie with her many regrets in life. At a party thrown by her […]

The sinister side of suburbia

The Road Through the Wall by Shirley Jackson

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I know it’s not very original, but I’ve long had an interest in suburbia. Watching movies like Edward Scissorhands and reading books like The Stepford Wives only fuelled that; I love the idea of the secrets that lie below the surface of a seemingly perfect life. Shirley Jackson clearly shared that interest, and managed to turn it into a fantastic, suspenseful novel. Jackson is most well known for books like The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, but while I like those, […]



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