Shirley Jackson

  • Beyond “The Lottery”

    Although best known for “The Lottery”, there was much more to Shirley Jackson’s work—and life. At the New York Times, Charles McGrath reviews of Ruth Franklin’s new biography A Rather Haunted Life, and explores Franklin’s journalistic yet personal take on the woman who…

  • VISIBLE: Women Writers of Color: Jaquira Díaz

    VISIBLE: Women Writers of Color: Jaquira Díaz

    Jaquira Díaz discusses the challenge of writing about family members, her greatest joy as a writer, and her literary role models.

  • Readers’ Work

    Vivid, shiver-inducing, short story excerpts stud “The Summer People of Shirley Jackson and Kelly Link” over at Longreads. On conjuring a story with the same title as Jackson’s original, iconic, and creepy “The Summer People,” Kelly Link says, “I liked…

  • The Rumpus Interview with Victor LaValle

    The Rumpus Interview with Victor LaValle

    Victor LaValle discusses his latest book, The Ballad of Black Tom, patience, H.P. Lovecraft, and reinvention.

  • Swinging Modern Sounds #67: The Franchise Restaurants of Song

    Swinging Modern Sounds #67: The Franchise Restaurants of Song

    Musician Owen Ashworth on his new album, Nephew in the Wild, literary influences, self-expression in songwriting, and how becoming a father has changed his work.

  • This Week in Short Fiction

    The last few weeks have been all about celebrating female masters of the short story. Earlier this month, we saw collections by Clarice Lispector and Shirley Jackson making waves in the literary swimming pool, and this week Lucia Berlin enters with…

  • This Week in Short Fiction

    This week, two underappreciated masters of the weird and uncanny are finally getting their due attention. That’s right, we’re talking about Clarice Lispector and Shirley Jackson, two literary powerhouses who wrote contemporaneously in different styles, different languages, even different hemispheres,…

  • On Writing and Garlic

    Welcoming Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings, a new collection of Shirley Jackson’s writings out today from Random House, the New Yorker offers a three-installment series of lectures on writing by the seminal author excerpted from the book: “Memory…

  • Would You Rather Babysit Cathy Ames or Christine Hargensen?

    What do Yukio Mishima, Tana French, Shirley Jackson, and John Steinbeck have in common? They’re the masterminds behind a couple of the most evil fictional youngsters of all time, according to a list compiled by British bookstore Abebooks. The list…

  • Bringing Up Baby

    Shirley Jackson’s bone-chilling story “The Lottery” is probably the last thing anyone wants to associate with Mother’s Day, yet her lurking plot twists and sharp character insights are the perfect tools to write about parenting. In this month’s Slate Book…

  • This Week in Short Fiction

    It’s only February, but 2015 is already proving to be a treasure trove of big happenings in the world of short stories. Take this past Tuesday, when Kelly Link, Charles Baxter, and Neil Gaiman all released new collections, undoubtedly making the…

  • Weekend Rumpus Roundup

    In the latest “The Last Book I Loved,” S. Hope Mills tackles the thriller-esque 1959 novel, The Haunting of Hill House. Shirley Jackson’s talents are strong enough to spook even the avowedly un-spookable—that woman, Mills admits, “knew what it meant to…