The lottery and other stories - Shirley Jackson

'Shirley Jackson's stories are among the most terrifying ever written'
Donna Tartt

This is the definitive collection of Shirley Jackson's short stories,
including
'The Lottery' - one of the most terrifying and iconic stories
of the
twentieth century, and an influence on writers such as Neil
Gaiman and Stephen King.

In
these stories an excellent host finds himself turned out of home by his
own guests; a
woman spends her wedding day frantically searching for
her
husband-to-be; and in Shirley Jackson's best-known story, a small
farming village comes together for a terrible annual ritual. The
creeping unease of lives squandered and the bloody glee of lives lost
is
chillingly captured in these tales of wasted potential and casual
cruelty by a master of the short story.

Shirley
Jackson's chilling tales have the
power to unsettle and terrify unlike
any other. She was born in
California in 1916. When her short story The Lottery was first published in The New Yorker
in 1948, readers were so horrified they sent her hate mail; it has
since become one of the greatest American stories of all time. Her
first novel, The Road Through the Wall, was published in the same year and was followed by five more: Hangsaman, The Bird's Nest, The Sundial, The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, widely seen as her masterpiece. Shirley Jackson died in her sleep at the age of 48.


'An amazing writer ... if you haven't read any of her short stories ...
you have missed out on something marvellous'
Neil Gaiman

'Her
stories are stunning, timeless - as relevant and terrifying now as
when
they were first published ... 'The Lottery' is so much an icon in
the
history of the American short story that one could argue it has
moved
from the canon of American twentieth-century fiction directly into
the
American psyche, our collective unconscious' A. M. Homes