![]() ![]() ![]() "Pillar of Salt", for instance, masterfully evokes the mental breakdown of a New Hampshire wife while on a trip to the city: "The people seemed hurled on in a frantic action that made every hour forty-five minutes long" the children, with their toy tills and miniature telephones, seem like "hideous little parodies of adult life". But among the highlights here are her depictions of mid-century New York. The weird farming community of "The Lottery" seems likewise anomalous: Jackson's protagonists tend to be mothers, or women starting their homemaking careers.īorn in San Francisco in 1916, Jackson spent her married life in small-town Vermont (the hostility that she and her Jewish husband experienced there is said to have informed "The Lottery"). Elsewhere, however, Jackson aims to disquiet rather than shock: the threat is often latent in Jackson's work,as Donna Tartt has observed. ![]() First published in 1948, "The Lottery" details a long-established rite that culminates in murder. T he title story might be the one for which Shirley Jackson is famed but, as this volume suggests, it was not entirely typical of her oeuvre. ![]()
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