num_pages: 448
description: Named one of the best books of the year by NPR  From the renowned author of The Lottery and The Haunting of Hill House a spectacular new volume of previously unpublished and uncollected stories essays and other writings.Features Family Treasures nominated for the Edgar Award for Best Short StoryShirley Jackson is one of the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 piecesmore than forty of which have never been published before. Two of Jacksons children co-edited this volume culling through the vast archives of their mothers 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. Jacksons landscape here is most frequently domestic: dinner parties and bridge household budgets and homeward-bound commutes childrens 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 communitythe pressure of social norms the veins of distrust in love the constant lack of time and space.For the first time this collection showcases Shirley Jacksons 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.
language: English
title: Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings
publisher: Random House