Let Me Tell You
Authors: Shirley Jackson
Shirley Jackson's short stories in
Let Me Tell You
are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Illustrations, quotations, and all previously unpublished text by Shirley Jackson copyright © 2015 by Laurence Jackson Hyman, J. S. Holly, Sarah Hyman DeWitt, and Barry Hyman
Biographical Note, compilation, and Afterword copyright © 2015 by Penguin Random House LLC
Foreword copyright © 2015 by Ruth Franklin
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
R
ANDOM
H
OUSE
and the
H
OUSE
colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
The following pieces have been previously published: “Paranoia,” “The Man in the Woods,” and “It Isn't the Money I Mind” in
The New Yorker
and also in
Shirley Jackson: Novels and Stories,
edited by Joyce Carol Oates (New York: The Library of America, 2010); “Mrs. Spencer and the Oberons” in
Tin House;
“The Lie” and “The Sorcerer's Apprentice” in
McSweeney's;
“Let Me Tell You” in
Tin House's Open Bar;
“Bulletin” in
Fantasy & Science Fiction;
“Root of Evil” in
Fantastic;
“Clowns” in
Vogue;
“Good Old House” in
Woman's Day;
“In Praise of Dinner Table Silence,” “Questions I Wish I'd Never Asked,” “What I Want to Know Is, What Do Other People Cook With?,” “Mother, Honestly!,” and “Out of the Mouths of Babes” in
Good Housekeeping;
“How to Enjoy a Family Quarrel” and “The Pleasures and Perils of Dining Out with Children” in
McCall's;
and “Homecoming” in
Charm.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jackson, Shirley, 1916â1965.
[Works. Selections. 2015]
Let me tell you: new stories, essays, and other writings/Shirley Jackson; edited by Laurence Jackson Hyman and Sarah Hyman DeWitt.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-8129-9766-8
eBook ISBN 978-0-8129-9767-5
I. Hyman, Laurence Jackson, editor. II. DeWitt, Sarah Hyman, editor. III. Title.
PS3519.A392A6 2015
818'.54âdc23
2014036656
eBook ISBNâ9780812997675
Book design by Susan Turner, adapted for eBook
Cover illustration and design: Edel Rodriguez
v4.1
ep
“I just like the binding, that's all.”
Margaret stood all alone at her first witch-burning. She had on her new blue cap and her sister's shawl, and she stood by herself, waiting. She had long ago given up on finding her sister and brother-in-law in the crowd, and was now content to watch alone. She felt a very pleasant fear and a crying excitement over the burning; she had lived all her life in the country and now, staying with her sister in the city, she was being introduced to the customs of society.
â
S
HIRLEY
J
ACKSON
Shirley Jackson, whose short story “The Lottery” firmly established her as a master of the form, was born in San Francisco on December 14, 1916. She grew up in the affluent suburb of Burlingame, California, a community whose prejudice and wickedness Jackson savaged in her first novel,
The Road Through the Wall
(1948). Upon graduation from Syracuse University in 1940 she married fellow student (and future literary critic) Stanley Edgar Hyman and eventually settled in New York City. In 1945 Hyman joined the faculty of Bennington College, and the couple moved with their growing family to North Bennington, Vermont. Jackson artfully chronicled the joys and difficulties of bringing up four garrulous, rambunctious children in
Life Among the Savages
(1953) and
Raising Demons
(1957), two works that place her among the front ranks of contemporary American humorists.
“I find [writing] relaxing,” Jackson once remarked. “There is delight in seeing a story grow; it's so deeply satisfyingâlike having a winning streak in poker.” Her first nationally published short story, “My Life with R. H. Macy,” appeared in
The New Republic
in 1941. Jackson's most famous story, “The Lottery,” was printed in
The New Yorker
on June 26, 1948. It prompted an unprecedented reaction from readers, most of whom felt betrayed by the story's unexpected, gruesome ending. “I have been assured over and over that if it had been the only story I ever wrote or published, there would be people who would not forget my name,” confessed Jackson. “Of the three-hundred-odd letters that I received that summer I can count only thirteen that spoke kindly to me, and they were mostly from friends. Even my mother scolded me.” Her first collection of short fiction,
The Lottery; or, The Adventures of James Harris,
came out in 1949. In the children's book
The Witchcraft of Salem Village
(1956) she attempted to explain in simplified terms the seeming madness that swept seventeenth-century Salem.
Jackson enhanced her reputation as a literary master with a succession of Gothic novels.
Hangsaman
(1951) tells of a shy, sensitive adolescent who escapes parental oppression by retreating into a nightmare fantasy world.
The Bird's Nest
(1954), a psychological thriller about a woman with multiple personalities, was made into the 1957 film
Lizzie
. In
The Sundial
(1958) Jackson offered up a satirical, apocalyptic novel about a group of people who await Armageddon in a secluded country estate.
The Haunting of Hill House
(1959), a bloodcurdling ghost story hailed by Stephen King as one of the greatest horror novels of all time, and a finalist for the National Book Award.
We Have Always Lived in the Castle
(1962) is the macabre tale of two sisters ostracized by a community for allegedly murdering the rest of their family. “Jackson was a master of complexity of mood, an ironic explorer of the dark conflicting inner tyrannies of the mind and soul,” observed
New York Times
book critic Eliot Fremont-Smith.
Shirley Jackson died unexpectedly of heart failure on August 8, 1965. Stanley Edgar Hyman subsequently edited two omnibus collections of her work,
The Magic of Shirley Jackson
(1966) and
Come Along with Me
(1968).
Just an Ordinary Day,
a volume of Jackson's unpublished and uncollected short fiction, appeared in 1997. “Everything this author wroteâ¦has in it the dignity and plausibility of myth,” said
The New York Times Book Review
. “Shirley Jackson knew better than any writer since Hawthorne the value of haunted things.”