E-Book Overview
The Lottery, one of the most terrifying stories written in this century, created a sensation when it was first published in The New Yorker. "Power and haunting," and "nights of unrest" were typical reader responses. This collection, the only one to appear during Shirley Jackson's lifetime, unites "The Lottery:" with twenty-four equally unusual stories. Together they demonstrate Jack son's remarkable range--from the hilarious to the truly horrible--and power as a storyteller. Shirley Jackson (1919-65) wrote several books, including Hangsaman, Life Among the Savages, and We Have Always Lived in the Castle. For the last twenty years of her life, she lived in North Bennington, Vermont. One of the most terrifying stories of the twentieth century, "The Lottery" created a sensation when it was first published in The New Yorker. "Powerful and haunting" and "nights of unrest" were typical reader responses. Widely anthologized, "The Lottery" is today considered a classic work of short fiction.This collection, the only one to appear during Shirley Jackson's lifetime, combines "The Lottery" with twenty-four equally unusual or unsettling tales. Taken together, these writings demonstrate Jackson's remarkable and commanding range—from the commonplace to the chilling, from the hilarious to the truly horrible—as a modern storyteller.This FSG Classics edition also features a new introduction to Jackson's work by A. M. Homes. "Jackson is unparalleled as a leader in the field of beautifully written, quiet, cumulative shudders."—Dorothy Parker, Esquire"[These] stories remind one of the elemental terrors of childhood."—James Hilton, New York Herald Tribune "In her art, as in her life, Shirley Jackson was an absolute original. She listened to her own voice, kept her own counsel, isolated herself from all intellectual and literary currents . . . She was unique."—Newsweek
E-Book Content
DEDICATION For my mother and father INTRODUCTION BY A. M. HOMES The world of Shirley Jackson is eerie and unforgettable. It is a place where things are not what they seem; even on a day that is sunny and clear, “with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day,” there is the threat of darkness looming, of things taking a turn for the worse. Hers is the ever-observant eye, the mind’s eye, bearing witness. Out of the stories rises a magical somnambulist’s ether—the reader is left forever changed, the mark of the stories indelible upon the imagination, the soul. Jackson writes with a stunning simplicity; there is a graceful economy to her prose as she charts the smallest of movements, perceptual shifts—nothing pyrotechnic here. Her stories take place in small towns, in kitchens, at cocktail parties. Her characters are trapped by the petty prejudices of people who make themselves feel good by thinking they are somehow better than us all. They live in houses that need painting, in furnished rooms, inside the lives of others—as though in a psychic halfway house, having lost their footing. They are shy, unassuming folks who, for all intents and purposes, would pass through the physical world unnoticed. They care about appearances—how they are seen by others; they possess certain kinds of respectability and a healthy dose of small-town cruelty. This is about politics on the most macro of levels. There is great concern for how one is perceived, how one moves through and does—or, more likely, does not—fit into society, for everyone here is an outsider. Throughout, things are turned inside out, the private is made public, and there is the tension, the subtle electrical hum, of madness in the offing, of perpetual drama unfolding: something is going to happen, something assumedly unpleasant. Everything is thrown into relief, lit in a Hopperesque late-afternoon glow, the one-sided illumination both revealing and casting a long shadow. I can conjure the faces of each person Jackson de