Tag Archives: Shirley Jackson

Just An Ordinary Day by Shirley Jackson

Posted on by
Reply

Synopsis:
A collection of unpublished and previously uncollected short stories by the reigning queen of gothic Americana.

Review:
Short stories are not usually my cup of tea, because they’re over far too quickly. But I’ll read anything that Shirley Jackson writes, and I really enjoyed the stories found in Just An Ordinary Day, which I’ve been reading in fits and starts for several months.

Oddly enough, my favorites were among the unpublished pieces. In particular, I greatly enjoyed “My Recollections of S.B. Fairchild,” about a mail order department store purchase gone terribly wrong. There’s nothing unheimich about the story; rather, it’s a sharply conceived, tightly executed piece of American satire whose quotidian-ness is an asset, not a liability.

What I admire most about Jackson is her precision. I really don’t know if any modern writer as prolific as Jackson also produces such relentlessly perfect prose.

Button, Button by Richard Matheson

Posted on by
6

Synopsis:
A collection of short stories by a preeminent contributor to “The Twilight Zone.”

Review:
Button, Button is an uneven bit of business, purporting to highlight the very best of Richard Matheson’s “Uncanny Stories.” Some are good, one is spectacular, but others have not aged well.

First, the good:

“Button, Button” exhibits a flawless “Twilight Zone” concept and execution. Apparently a Cameron Diaz movie based on it is coming soon. Seems like a bad idea to me. The genius of the story demands a smallness not readily translatable to the big screen.

“Dying Room Only” is a quick and dirty thriller with great atmosphere, but a weak ending.

“A Flourish of Strumpets” seems more suited to the talents of Shirley Jackson, with its priggish couple assailed by a gang of prostitutes with the tenacity of door-to-door Jehovah’s Witnesses. Jackson would’ve mined the story’s full Gothic potential. Matheson keeps it clean but I wanted more quirk.

“Pattern for Survival” is a funny little tale about a most successful author. It took me a few reads to get the joke, which is quite subtle but highly rewarding.

The not-so-good:

“Creeping Terror” takes an amusingly sociological look at the spread of Los Angeles. It’s written like a research paper, a gimmick that doesn’t do it for me.

The outstanding:

“Girl of My Dreams” is a noir version of a gothic premise: a young woman who can see how people may die, and her blackmailing boyfriend have a disagreement over a mark. I loved the tone he maintains throughout. This is the one I’d most like to see as a movie.

“Mute” is quite different than the other stories, lacking either a gimmick or a stylized tone. It’s the story of a young man who can’t talk, and the people who are trying to usher him into the world of language. Ferocious and mysterious, this is the story that most sucked me in.

Favorite Author Meme

Posted on by
1

Heather at Errant Dreams came up with a wonderful meme–enjoy & consider yourself tagged!

* Answer the questions as you see fit. Although they’re all phrased to ask about a singular author, feel free to respond with multiples, or even a list.
* Where possible & convenient (you don’t have to go as crazy as I did!), include a link here or there to an author’s website, your review of one of their books, or a review that inspired you to try the author(s), so your readers can get more information on anyone that sounds interesting.
* Tag five people and drop by their blogs to let them know you tagged them, or open-tag your readers.
* It would be nice if you included a link back to your tagger.

1. Who’s your all-time favorite author, and why?

I think I would have to say CS Lewis. I’ve read all of his books, many of them several times. I’ve read the Narnia Chronicles at least a dozen times, and books like The Great Divorce and The Screwtape Letters have meant a lot to me at certain times in my life.

2. Who was your first favorite author, and why? Do you still consider him or her among your favorites?

The first author I remember being obsessed with–as in, I’ve got to read everything by this person–was John Bellairs. He wrote gothic stories for kids illustrated by Edward Gorey that were imaginative and just scary enough, and the first one I read was The House with a Clock in its Walls. I’m saving a few for Superfast Baby when she’s old enough. I had read multiple books by other authors, but I was more into the series, than the author, as with the All of a Kind Family books.

3. Who’s the most recent addition to your list of favorite authors, and why?

Robin Hobb, without question. She’s a superlative storyteller and I just lost myself in love starting with Assassin’s Apprentice. I’d also add Leo Tolstoy and Jhumpa Lahiri to the list, having read both of them for the first time in 2007.

4. If someone asked you who your favorite authors were right now, which authors would first pop out of your mouth? Are there any you’d add on a moment of further reflection?

Margaret Atwood, Jane Austen, Leo Tolstoy, Stephen King, Madeleine L’Engle, CS Lewis, Robin Hobb, George RR Martin, Shirley Jackson, Patricia Highsmith, Charles Dickens, Kathleen Norris, Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine, Dan Allender, Edith Wharton, Jhumpa Lahiri.

Nothing really to add on further reflection. I spend a lot of time thinking about my favorite authors!

The Alphabet Meme

Posted on by
6

Picked this meme up from Melanie, in honor of two YA books I read for work this weekend.

The goal of this is to list favourite authors according to last name (with a representative fave book as well).

Atwood, Margaret — Cat’s Eye
Bronte, Charlotte — Jane Eyre
Card, Orson Scott — Ender’s Game
Dragonwagon, Crescent — The Year It Rained (with Paul Zindel)
Eager, Edward — Half Magic
Forster, EM — Howard’s End
Gibson, William — Neuromancer
Hobb, Robin — Ship of Magic
Ishiguro, Kazuo — And Never Let Me Go
Jackson, Shirley — Hangsaman
King, Stephen — The Gunslinger
Lewis, CS — Till We Have Faces
Martin, George RR — Game of Thrones
Novik, Naomi — His Majesty’s Dragon
Oates, Joyce Carol — Blonde
Percy, Walker — The Last Gentleman
Queenan, Joe — If You’re Talking to Me, Your Career Must Be in Trouble
Rendell, Ruth — Judgment in Stone
Smith, Wesley — Culture of Death
Tolkien, JRR — The Return of the King
Undset, Sigrid — Kristin Lavransdatter
Vine, Barbara — A Dark-Adapted Eye
Wharton, Edith — Twilight Sleep
X — I’ll read the next book someone recommends by an author whose last name starts with X.
Yancey, Phillip — Where is God When It Hurts?
Zarr, Sara — Story of a Girl

Top 20 Meme

Posted on by
1

Picked this up from Becky:

The rules: Top twenty favourite books in no particular order. Don’t think about it for too long. Take twenty minutes only to compile your list. Bold the ones you’ve read, or reread, since you’ve started blogging. Include novels, non fiction and plays.

1. The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
2. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
3. Peyton Place by Grace Metalious
4. Wolves of the Calla by Stephen King
5. Ship of Magic by Robin Hobb
6. Till We Have Faces by CS Lewis
7. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
8. Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson
9. Arcadia by Tom Stoppard
10. Asylum by Patrick McGrath
11. Rebecca by Daphne DuMaurier
12. Anna Karenina Leo Tolstoy
13. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
14. Hangsaman by Shirley Jackson
15. Private Demons by Judy Oppenheimer
16. Bird by Bird by Anne LaMott
17. The Cloister Walk by Kathleen Norris
18. Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis
19. The Long Emergency by James Howard Kunstler
20. Birth at Home by Sheila Kitzinger

Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri

Posted on by
7

Synopsis:
A collection of short stories set mostly among Indian immigrants in the US.

Review:
Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake was one of my favorite reads of last year, so I decided I needed to check out her much-buzzed about collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies. It will surprise no one who has read these tales that I found them both simple and spectacular.

I am not usually a fan of short stories, though now that I am short on time for reading I’m finding them to be the perfect reading experience. In the past, I have gotten frustrated with short stories because they are over just too quickly, and I can’t read more than two from the same collection at a sitting without feeling like they’re starting to run together. Short stories are best appreciated on their own, so they’re just not suited for long reading sessions. They are, however, ideal for subway trips while wearing a baby who’s not sure she wants to take a nap. A 45-minute commute yields maybe 15 minutes of reading time. And that’s the perfect span for appreciating a good short story.

My other usual beef with short stories is that most of them seem to be trying too hard. It’s rare–outside of genre fiction–for a story to capture my attention based on concept alone. I just don’t want to read a strictly realist short story, no matter how acute the insights. Ho hum, is what I say. I most admire those stories that take me somewhere I’ve never been before. That’s why I’ve devoured Shirley Jackson’s stories. Most of them are set in the “real” world, but things are always just a little bit tweaked, with humor or with gothic weirdness or with just plain horror.

Lahiri certainly delivers a larger-than-life experience in each story. She’s got unique characters who are spellbinding without falling into quirky cliche, and she gives each story a plot with a strong enough motor to keep me turning the pages. She just has a way of making me curious about her situations, and when the stories are over I’m sad to say goodbye to the people to whom she’s introduced me.

My favorite story is the last, “The Third and Final Continent.” It’s an achingly sweet musing on the nature of love and longevity. The prose of the ending is so plain and direct that it’s like opening the door to a familiar surprise. The quiet confidence of her writing is alluring and winsome, and her command of point-of-view conjured up my beloved Kazuo Ishiguro.

May I Introduce… (Booking Through Thursday)

Posted on by
7
  • btt button
    1. How did you come across your favorite author(s)? Recommended by a friend? Stumbled across at a bookstore? A book given to you as a gift?
    2. Was it love at first sight? Or did the love affair evolve over a long acquaintance?

    You can find my favorite authors listed in the first sidebar column. Here’s a rundown of how I met them all:

    • CS Lewis–My father read the Chronicles of Narnia to me when was a little girl. For my 6th birthday, I had a cake featuring the old cover art from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. In college, I attended a two-week symposium in Cambridge, England, sponsored by the CS Lewis Institute, and that’s where I fell in love with his non-fiction.
    • Edith Wharton–I hated Ethan Frome, but fell in lover with Age of Innocence in college. I tore through the rest of her books. Still don’t like Ethan Frome, though.
    • Flannery O’Connor love came from reading Wise Blood in high school.
    • Jane Austen–now that’s an interesting case. I had to read Pride and Prejudice in ninth grade and hated it. Just a few years ago, I decided to give her another chance, and read Sense and Sensibility. I adored it, and adored all the rest of her books… including Pride and Prejudice.
    • JRR Tolkien love grew from a lifelong adoration of Middle Earth from reading The Hobbit and watching the animated movies. On that same trip to Cambridge, I read The Lord of the Rings for the first time and my passion was sealed.
    • Patricia Highsmith, Ruth Rendell, and Barbara Vine were library reads. I had heard good things about them, and decided to take a chance.
    • Shirley Jackson I picked up while working in development for a film producer. We were looking for material and somebody suggested I check out her work. Ah, me! One taste and I was lost. I found a book scout in Canada who tracked down all her out of print books for me.
    • Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising was assigned reading in sixth grade. I immediately got my hands on the rest of the series, and have since reread it several times. I can’t wait to introduce them to Bean.
    • Walker Percy was yet another author I discovered in Cambridge. I read Lost in the Cosmos, then his fiction, then the rest of his non-fiction essays on semiotics. He played a big part in forming my identity in my early 20s.

    You may also notice I have a list of Author Sites I Love. Here’s how I met those folks:

    • Dan Allender was thanks to counseling with a former pastor.
    • David Bordwell from a grad school course on film narrative.
    • George RR Martin was a recommendation from my best friend from college.
    • Jeffrey Overstreet is a great blogger.
    • Laurie Halse Anderson wrote Speak, and there’s a whole story about me and that book that I’ll save for another day.
    • Libba Bray was recommended to me by an eighth grader at my old high school. I did a speaking engagement, and this girl was my mini-me–frizzy hair, socially awkward, and a huge bookworm.
    • Madeleine L’Engle I’ve blogged about before, in a post on books that evoked a strong emotional reaction in me.
    • Robin Hobb was a recommendation from the girlfriend of a college friend of my husband’s. This guy teases Melissa for reading what he calls “vampires in space” books. My husband likes to say, “How can you write a book about a dragon?” She and I hit it off immediately.
    • Save the Cat! is the site of a recent book on screenwriting that my manager made me read. I wish I had read it ages ago… it really does live up to its own hype.
    • Scott Westerfeld was discovered by me during a search to find young adult books that would make great movies. The Uglies series is being made into a movie, though not with me.
    • Stephen King saved my life freshman year in college, before I made friends and a life. I whiled away many a long boring night with one of his gazillions of books, checked out of the library.
    • T. Greenwood’s book Nearer than the Sky is quite special to me. A friend and I have an option on it and hope to turn it into a movie.

    And there you have it–wow, it’s amazing what I can do while the baby takes a nap!

    • Highlights (Booking Through Thursday)

    Posted on by
    10

    From Booking Through Thursday:

    It’s an old question, but a good one . . . What were your favorite books this year?

    List as many as you like … fiction, non-fiction, mystery, romance, science-fiction, business, travel, cookbooks … whatever the category. But, really, we’re all dying to know. What books were the highlight of your reading year in 2007?

    It was a good year, reading-wise. Here are my highlights, with links to my reviews.

    The Ghost Writer by John Harwood

    East of Eden by John Steinbeck

    The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri

    Private Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson by Judy Oppenheimer

    The Cross (Kristin Lavransdatter 3) by Sigrid Undset

    War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

    Twisted by Laurie Halse Anderson

    Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (translated by Joel Carmichael)

    Judgment in Stone by Ruth Rendell

    And a few series:

    Dave Duncan’s A Man of His Word and A Handful of Men

    Megan Lindholm’s Ki and Vandien Quartet

    100 Most Influential Books by Women

    Posted on by
    11

    Via BookGal–I’ve bolded the ones I’ve read.

    1. Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind
    2. Anne Rice, Interview With the Vampire
    3. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
    4. Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
    5. Virginia Woolf, The Waves
    6. Virginia Woolf, Orlando
    7. Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
    8. Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth
    9. Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
    10. Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome
    11. Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness
    12. Nadine Gordimer, Burger’s Daughter
    13. Harriette Simpson Arnow, The Dollmaker
    14. Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
    15. Willa Cather, My Ántonia
    16. Erica Jong, Fear of Flying
    17. Erica Jong, Fanny
    18. Joy Kogawa, Obasan
    19. Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
    20. Doris Lessing, The Fifth Child
    21. Doris Lessing, The Grass Is Singing
    22. Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
    23. Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time
    24. Jane Smiley, A Thousand Acres
    25. Lore Segal, Her First American
    26. Alice Walker, The Color Purple
    27. Alice Walker, The Third Life of Grange Copeland
    28. Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Mists of Avalon
    29. Muriel Spark, Memento Mori
    30. Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
    31. Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina
    32. Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea
    33. Susan Fromberg Shaeffer, Anya
    34. Cynthia Ozick, Trust
    35. Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club
    36. Amy Tan, The Kitchen God’s Wife
    37. Ann Beattie, Chilly Scenes of Winter
    38. Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
    39. Joan Didion, A Book of Common Prayer
    40. Joan Didion, Play It as It Lays
    41. Mary McCarthy, The Group
    42. Mary McCarthy, The Company She Keeps
    43. Grace Paley, The Little Disturbances of Man
    44. Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
    45. Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
    46. Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart
    47. Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood
    48. Mona Simpson, Anywhere But Here
    49. Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon
    50. Toni Morrison, Beloved
    51. Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm
    52. Sylvia Townsend Warner, Mr. Fortune’s Maggot
    53. Katherine Anne Porter, Ship of Fools
    54. Laura Riding, Progress of Stories
    55. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Heat and Dust
    56. Penelope Fitzgerald, The Blue Flower
    57. Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits
    58. A.S. Byatt, Possession
    59. Pat Barker, The Ghost Road
    60. Rita Mae Brown, Rubyfruit Jungle
    61. Anita Brookner, Hotel du Lac
    62. Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus
    63. Daphne Du Maurier, Rebecca
    64. Katherine Dunn, Geek Love
    65. Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle
    66. Barbara Pym, Excellent Women
    67. Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony
    68. Anne Tyler, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
    69. Anne Tyler, The Accidental Tourist
    70. Nancy Willard, Things Invisible to See
    71. Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry
    72. Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Disturbances in the Field
    73. Rosellen Brown, Civil Wars
    74. Harriet Doerr, Stones for Ibarra
    75. Harriet Doerr, The Mountain Lion
    76. Stevie Smith. Novel on Yellow Paper
    77. E. Annie Proulx, The Shipping News
    78. Rebecca Goldstein, The Mind-Body Problem
    79. P.D. James, The Children of Men
    80. Ursula Hegi, Stones From the River
    81. Fay Weldon, The Life and Loves of a She-Devil
    82. Katherine Mansfield, Collected Stories
    83. Rebecca Harding Davis, Life in the Iron Mills
    84. Louise Erdrich, The Beet Queen
    85. Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
    86. Edna O’Brien, The Country Girls Trilogy
    87. Margaret Drabble, Realms of Gold
    88. Margaret Drabble, The Waterfall
    89. Dawn Powell, The Locusts Have No King
    90. Marilyn French, The Women’s Room
    91. Eudora Welty, The Optimist’s Daughter
    92. Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries (I just reviewed this one!)
    93. Jamaica Kincaid, Annie John
    94. Tillie Olsen, Tell Me a Riddle
    95. Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
    96. Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head
    97. Anita Desai, Clear Light of Day
    98. Alice Hoffman, The Drowning Season
    99. Sue Townsend, The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole
    100. Penelope Mortimer, The Pumpkin Eater

    Umm… no Jane Austen?

    Come Along With Me by Shirley Jackson

    Posted on by
    7

    Synopsis:
    Short stories, essays, and an unfinished novel by Shirley Jackson, queen of American Gothic and author of “The Lottery.”

    Review:
    My love for Shirley Jackson has been well documented in this blog, so I was delighted when my husband got me Come Along With Me for my birthday.

    The collection opens with “Come Along With Me,” the novel that Jackson was working on when she died at the untimely age of 44. At about 33 pages, there isn’t much of a narrative, just a character study of an eccentric woman, drawn with Jackson’s signature idiosyncratic touch. It’s disappointing that she never completed the novel, because this fragment shows signs of being as complex and rich a work as the puzzling Hangsaman, my favorite of Jackson’s novels.

    The stories that follow aren’t, in my opinion, as masterful as those found in The Lottery and Other Stories, but they’re still worth reading. My favorite was “The Bus,” where an elderly woman takes a bus ride into “Twilight Zone” territory. It’s terse and terrifying without being overstated.

    Closing the collection are two lectures on writing and an essay on “The Lottery,” Jackson’s most famous short story, in which she discusses the spectrum of reactions to the story. The essays on writing are inspirational in a folksy sort of way, and offer great practical advice on story construction and harnessing the creative process. I will absolutely be rereading these.