The Lottery and Other Stories
Donna Tartt once called Shirley Jackson's stories among the most terrifying ever written, and after reading this collection, it's very hard to argue otherwise. This definitive gathering of her short fiction includes 'The Lottery', the story that rattled American readers so violently upon its 1948 publication in The New Yorker that Jackson received hate mail by the sackful. Iconic barely covers it. The stories collected here work on you quietly, then all at once. A gracious host finds himself edged out of his own home by the very guests he welcomed. A bride spends her wedding day in a frantic, increasingly desperate search for the man she's supposed to marry. And in the title story, the residents of a small rural village gather for an annual ritual whose nature, when it arrives, lands like a cold stone in the chest. Jackson writes about wasted lives and casual violence with an almost cheerful precision that makes it all the more disturbing. Born in California in 1916, Jackson spent her career unsettling readers with a particular brand of domestic horror, the kind that hides in plain sight. Her novels, including the widely admired 'We Have Always Lived in the Castle', cemented her reputation. She died aged 48, leaving behind a body of work that still feels unnervingly fresh. As the novelist A. M. Homes has noted, 'The Lottery' has moved beyond the literary canon and lodged itself somewhere deeper, in the collective unconscious of American culture. This collection is the ideal place to understand exactly why.
- Author: Shirley Jackson
- Publisher: Penguin UK
- Genre: Horror
- ISBN: 978-0141191430
- Pages: 320 pages