**A bewitchingly brilliant collection of never-before-published letters
from the renowned author of "The Lottery" and *The Haunting of Hill
House
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY KIRKUS REVIEWS - "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
*
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 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.
*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.
*
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. 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. But in
recounting these events to family, friends, and colleagues, she turns
them into remarkable stories: entertaining, revealing, and wise. At the
same time, many of these letters provide fresh insight into the genesis
and progress of Jackson's writing over nearly three decades.
*The novel is getting sadder. 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.
*
Compiled and edited by her elder son, Laurence Jackson Hyman, in
consultation with Jackson scholar Bernice M. 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.
