Shirley Jackson: Novels and Stories Book

This Library of America edition contains Shirley Jackson's short-story collection The Lottery and Other Stories; the novels The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle; and a section titled "Other Stories and Sketches." Having read and at least rated the others already, I'm only reviewing the latter (and the volume as a whole) here.

"Other Stories and Sketches" is divided into 'Uncollected' and 'Unpublished.' (I recently read a few of these in Just an Ordinary Day: The Uncollected Stories.) A very short story, first published in Syracuse University's literary annual, leads off, immediately displaying Jackson's dark quirky humor. (After reading the story, Jackson's future husband sought her out as the woman he was going to marry.) Collected together as they are, several of the stories seem to display a recurring theme of houses (as do some of her novels), whether big or small, seemingly benign at first, eventually displaying frightening qualities, even if these are in the character's mind. (Perhaps the editor, Joyce Carol Oates, was drawn to this theme in her choices of stories to include.) A story delving into the mind of an elderly woman reminded me of a story in The Lottery that also uses imagery of an island beach as a means of (mental) escape. Jackson lived in a rambling house she increasingly didn't venture out of, so it's tempting to project onto Jackson her characters' feelings about home and escape. Two other stories end with a reversal, or ambiguity, that had me paging back to reread the masterful dialogue of each. Even the previously unpublished stories (one the beginning of an unfinished novel) range from good to very good.

The appendix, "Biography of a Story," is the transcription of a talk Jackson gave several times relating the mail she and The New Yorker received after the publication of "The Lottery." It's told in a humorous way, but some of the letters reminded me of the illiterate hate mail Mary McCarthy received after the publication of the essays that comprise her Memories of a Catholic Girlhood.

I haven't read a biography of Jackson so I learned some new things in the "Chronology," including some activity by her community that certainly fueled the writing of We Have Always Lived in the Castle. In an article I came across online I read of a Newsweek critic who "protested" Shirley Jackson's inclusion in the Library of America as "an exercise in barrel-scraping." The volume shows how wrong that unnamed critic was.