She died in 1965 at the age of forty-eight. She is the author of six novels, including The Haunting of Hill House, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and The Sundial two bestselling family chronicles, Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons and hundreds of short stories, many published in five separate posthumous collections. She first received wide critical acclaim for her short story “The Lottery,” which was published in The New Yorker in 1948. Shirley Jackson was born in San Francisco in 1916. Murphy and featuring Jackson’s own witty line drawings, this intimate collection holds the beguiling prism of Shirley Jackson-writer and reader, mother and daughter, neighbor and wife-up to the light. It’s always such a strange feeling-I know something’s going to happen, and those poor people in the book don’t they just go blithely on their ways.Ĭompiled and edited by her elder son, Laurence Jackson Hyman, in consultation with Jackson scholar Bernice M. At the same time, many of these letters provide fresh insight into the genesis and progress of Jackson’s writing over nearly three decades. But in recounting these events to family, friends, and colleagues, she turns them into remarkable stories: entertaining, revealing, and wise. As well as being a bestselling author, Jackson spent much of her adult life as a mother of four in Vermont, and the landscape here is often the everyday: raucous holidays and trips to the dentist, overdue taxes and frayed lines of Christmas lights, new dogs and new babies. Written over the course of nearly three decades, from Jackson’s college years to six days before her early death at the age of forty-eight, these letters become the autobiography Shirley Jackson never wrote. I am having a fine time doing a novel with my left hand and a long story-with as many levels as grand central station-with my right hand, stirring chocolate pudding with a spoon held in my teeth, and tuning the television with both feet. This extraordinary compilation of personal correspondence has all the hallmarks of Jackson’s beloved fiction: flashes of the uncanny in the domestic, sparks of horror in the quotidian, and the veins of humor that run through good times and bad.
Shirley Jackson is one of the most important American authors of the last hundred years and among our greatest chroniclers of the female experience. “This biography-through-letters gives an intimate and warm voice to the imagination behind the treasury of uncanny tales that is Shirley Jackson’s legacy.”-Joyce Carol Oates.NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY KIRKUS REVIEWS A bewitchingly brilliant collection of never-before-published letters from the renowned author of “The Lottery” and The Haunting of Hill House
0 kommentar(er)
