The Mumpsimus

  Choosing a favorite Shirley Jackson story is nearly impossible. "The Lottery" is of course the famous one — easily among the most famous short stories in the English language — and because it is so ubiquitous, we (that is: I) can sometimes forget that it's also basically perfect. It is hard, though, to claim such an inescapable story as a favorite; to favor something, it mustn't feel as if it is always there.  For a long time, I've said "One Ordinary Day, with Peanuts" is my favorite, and it is certainly up there, a story of wonderful surprise and weird malice. So, too, "The Summer People" and "The Intoxicated" and plenty of others. But if we're talking about the story that I have read the most times, the story that I have returned to again and again to study how Jackson achieved what she did, then my favorite is clear: "Pillar of Salt". I first read it in the later 1980s when I was in middle school and got The Magic o...

Mike Flanagan's Netflix miniseries The Haunting of Hill House  is not an adaptation of the Shirley Jackson novel The Haunting of Hill House . The miniseries is a work of its own, separate, unique — but haunted by The Haunting of Hill House.  And not only The Haunting of Hill House : the miniseries is also haunted by the first adaptation of Jackson's novel, the classic 1963 film  The Haunting , and by numerous other stories and movies ( The Legend of Hell House , The Shining , etc.). During the first few episodes, I thought the connection to Jackson's novel was unnecessary, perhaps even burdensome. I assumed somebody had bought the rights and then, through the tortuous (and torturous) process of Hollywood development, the novel got more and more distant from the project while remaining contractually bound to it. Perhaps, I thought, Flanagan was able to do with this property what he'd done with Ouija: Origin of Evil  and convince the producers to let him make the...

Today is Shirley Jackson's 100th birthday, and as I think about her marvelous body of writing, I can't help also thinking of the changes in her reputation over the last few decades, or, rather, my perception of the changes in her reputation. For me, she was always a model and a master, but there was a time when that opinion felt lonely, indeed. I discovered her as so many people discover her: by reading "The Lottery" in school. (Middle school or early high school, I don't remember which.) I loved the story, of course, but it wasn't until I got David Hartwell's extraordinary anthology The Dark Descent  for Christmas one year that I really paid attention to Jackson's name, because the book includes the stories "The Summer People" and "The Beautiful Stranger", both of which I read again and again. Around the same time, I read Richard Lupoff's anthology What If?  and thus encountered what would become one of my favorite short s...

As of a few weeks ago, all of Shirley Jackson's novels are now in print in the United States, thanks to Penguin Books . ( UK editions of some are scheduled for March.) I noted in July that this was scheduled to happen, and I fully intended then to write all about the novels individually, but that hasn't yet happened. (I still plan to do so as soon as possible, but the whole getting-a-PhD thing is a bit of an obstacle at the moment.) I've been reading Jackson's work for most of my life, but finding copies of any but her most famous books has always been difficult — and in the case of Hangsaman , nearly impossible unless you wanted to shell out a lot of money for an old copy. When the Library of America announced they were putting together a Shirley Jackson volume a few years ago, edited by Joyce Carol Oates, I had high hopes that it would include at least one of the lesser-known novels, but it didn't. Yes, The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived...

A trio of items... 1. Penguin Books is, slowly but surely, bringing all of Shirley Jackson's work back into print. Earlier this year they brought back the posthumous collection Come Along with Me , and just a few weeks ago they released new editions of novels that have been out of print for ages: The Road Through the Wall  (her first novel) and Hangsaman . You'll be hearing more about those here later this summer. I've also gotten confirmation that Penguin will release  The Bird's Nest  and The Sundial  at the end of January 2014 — two strange and fascinating books that have long deserved to be available once again ( The Bird's Nest  is currently available in the e-book of The Magic of Shirley Jackson ). Returning these books to print has brought about some new writing on Jackson. In March, Slate  published "Why You Should Read Shirley Jackson" by William Brennan; last month, The New Yorker's  book blog posted a fascinating account by Ruth Fran...