Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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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, […]

and they’ll live there evermore

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson

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Dark, melancholic and undoubtedly the source of so many horror movies, We Have Always Lived in the Castle tells the story of 18-year old Mary Katherine Blackwood, her sister Constance and their wheelchair bound uncle Julian, who live in a grand house in Vermont on their own. The rest of their family died six years ago in a tragic poisoning for which Constance was blamed but acquitted. The villagers still suspect and fear her though, so she lives as a shut-in and only Mary Katherine, […]

This one was mysterious and disturbing

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson

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My book club was looking for something short (because we were all feeling lazy), and we somehow came up with We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962) by Shirley Jackson. I was informed that I must know Jackson from the short story The Lottery, which I must have read in high school. They didn’t believe me when I said I hadn’t read it. And when I actually read The Lottery, I was still sure I hadn’t read it in high school. The Lottery is a very disturbing short story where the village commits a […]



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