Let Me Tell You

From the renowned author of “The Lottery” and The Haunting of Hill House, a spectacular new volume of previously unpublished and uncollected stories, essays, lectures, and letters.
 
Shirley Jackson is one of the most important American writers of the last hundred years. Since her death in 1965, her place in the landscape of twentieth-century fiction has grown only more exalted.
 
As we approach the centenary of her birth comes this astonishing compilation of fifty-six pieces—more than forty of which have never been published before. Two of Jackson's children co-edited this volume, culling through the vast archives of their mother's papers at the Library of Congress, selecting only the very best for inclusion.
 
Let Me Tell You brings together the deliciously eerie short stories Jackson is best known for, along with frank, inspiring lectures on writing; comic essays about her large, boisterous family; and whimsical drawings. Jackson's landscape here is most frequently domestic: dinner parties and bridge, household budgets and homeward-bound commutes, children's games and neighborly gossip. But this familiar setting is also her most subversive: She wields humor, terror, and the uncanny to explore the real challenges of marriage, parenting, and community—the pressure of social norms, the veins of distrust in love, the constant lack of time and space.
 
This collection is the first opportunity to see Shirley Jackson's radically different modes of writing side by side. Together they show her to be a magnificent storyteller, a sharp, sly humorist, and a powerful feminist.
 
This volume includes a Foreword by the celebrated literary critic and Jackson biographer Ruth Franklin.

Advance praise for Let Me Tell You
 
“With the to-the-second pacing of a Twilight Zone episode, . . . [Shirley Jackson's] stories never fail to deliver. . . . It doesn't get much better than this.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
 
“Jackson, an inspiration to writers from Stephen King to Joyce Carol Oates, dared to look on the dark side and imagine the unimaginable, as demonstrated in this volume of her uncollected and unpublished work. . . . A multifaceted portrait of the artist as wife, mother, commentator on the comfortable middle class, and pioneer who explored the world of inexplicable, occasionally frightening phenomena.”—Publishers Weekly
 
“Remember the chilling excitement of reading Jackson's ‘The Lottery' for the first time? You'll have that same experience over and over again with this new collection.”—Library Journal
 
Praise for Shirley Jackson
 
“Shirley Jackson's stories are among the most terrifying ever written.”—Donna Tartt
 
“Jackson is unparalleled as a leader in the field of beautifully written, quiet, cumulative shudders.”—Dorothy Parker, Esquire
 
“[Jackson plumbs] the extraordinary from the depths of mid-twentieth-century common.”—San Francisco Chronicle
 
“In her art, as in her life, Shirley Jackson was an absolute original. She listened to her own voice, kept her own counsel, isolated herself from all intellectual and literary current. . . . She was unique.”—Newsweek
 
“The Haunting of Hill House and James's The Turn of the Screw are the only two great novels of the supernatural in the last hundred years.”—Stephen King