Shirley Jackson
Shirley Jackson is known to countless American schoolchildren today primarily for one story: “The Lottery,” a terrifying portrait of the brutality within us, which, when it first appeared in The New Yorker, in 1948, prompted scores of outraged letters. (“The number of people who expected Mrs. Hutchinson to win a Bendix washing machine at the end would amaze you,” Jackson wryly noted.) Yet Jackson’s history with the magazine includes fifteen stories, some of which were published after her death, in 1965, at the age of forty-eight. Born in San Francisco, Jackson settled in North Bennington, Vermont, whose small-town milieu informed much of her fiction. She wrote more than two hundred stories and six novels, including “The Haunting of Hill House” and “We Have Always Lived in the Castle,” in which she paired elements of horror and suspense with psychological acuity to depict what she called the “demon of the mind.”
Selected Stories
The Lottery
The Man in the Woods
Paranoia
Trial by Combat
All Fiction
All Fiction
New Yorker Podcasts
Emma Cline Reads “The Iceman”
The author reads her story from the August 23, 2021, issue of the magazine.A. M. Homes Reads Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”
Homes reads and discusses Jackson’s story from 1948, which was republished in the July 27, 2020, bonus archive issue of the magazine.Emma Cline Reads “White Noise”
The author reads her short story from the June 8 & 15, 2020, issue of the magazine.Kristen Roupenian Reads Shirley Jackson
The author joins Deborah Treisman to read and discuss “Afternoon in Linen,” by Shirley Jackson, from a 1943 issue of the magazine.
