Let Me Tell You
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3.0 • 2 Ratings
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- £3.99
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- £3.99
Publisher Description
From the peerless author of 'The Lottery' and 'We Have Always Lived in the Castle', this is a spectacular new volume of unpublished and uncollected stories, essays, lectures, letters and drawings.
Let Me Tell You brings together the deliciously eerie short stories Jackson is best known for with frank and inspiring lectures on writing; comic essays she wrote about her large, rowdy family; and revelatory personal letters and drawings. Jackson's landscape here is most frequently domestic - dinner parties, children's games and neighbourly gossip - but one that is continually threatened and subverted in her unsettling, inimitable prose. This collection is the first opportunity to see Shirley Jackson's radically different modes of writing side by side, revealing her to be a magnificent storyteller, a sharp, sly humorist and a powerful feminist.
Shirley Jackson was born in California in 1916. When her short storyThe Lottery was first published in The New Yorker in 1948, readers were so horrified they sent her hate mail; it has since become one of the most iconic American stories of all time. Her first novel, The Road Through the Wall, was published in the same year and was followed by five more: Hangsaman, The Bird's Nest, The Sundial, The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, widely seen as her masterpiece. In addition to her dark, brilliant novels, she wrote lightly fictionalized magazine pieces about family life with her four children and her husband, the critic Stanley Edgar Hyman. Shirley Jackson died in her sleep in 1965 at the age of 48.
'An amazing writer' Neil Gaiman
'The world of Shirley Jackson is eerie and unforgettable ... She is a true master' A. M. Homes
'Shirley Jackson's stories are among the most terrifying ever written' Donna Tartt
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Jackson, an inspiration to writers from Stephen King to Joyce Carol Oates, dared to look on the dark side and imagine the unimaginable, as demonstrated in this volume of her uncollected and unpublished work. The selected fiction and nonfiction ranges from explorations of the supernatural ("The Man in the Woods") to domestic humor ("In Praise of Dinner Table Silence") and observations of separated couples ("Homecoming"); from her earliest efforts ("Sorcerer's Apprentice") to lectures on writing that she gave at the height of her career ("Garlic in Fiction") all thoughtfully organized and edited by two of Jackson's four children. Not every piece equals the artistry of "The Lottery," the controversial 1948 story that became an anthology and textbook staple, nor do all the pieces prove as haunting as The Haunting of Hill House. Yet together they are a multifaceted portrait of the artist as wife, mother, commentator on the comfortable middle class, and pioneer who explored a world of inexplicable, occasionally frightening phenomena. Writing about her kitchen, she describes its feuding forks, preening glasses, and sarcastic eggbeater. Jackson suggests (rather than delves into) that which is unnerving, writing in a smart, sharp, clear voice. Line drawings, quotations, and a foreword by biographer Ruth Franklin enhance this reminder of why Jackson's reputation flourishes 50 years after her death.
