Overview

A powerful collection of short stories by Shirley Jackson The Lottery, one of the most terrifying stories of the twentieth century, created a sensation when it was first published in the New Yorker. Powerful and haunting, and nights of unrest were typical reader responses. This collection, the only one to appear during Jackson's lifetime, unites The Lottery with twenty-four equally unusual stories. Together they demonstrate her remarkable range--from the hilarious to the truly horrible--and power as a storyteller.

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9781483033334

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Reviews

If you listen to this audiobook to hear the title story, you won't be disappointed. But it's fortunate that you'll get to listen to twenty-four other wonderful stories before hearing 'The Lottery.' With masterful performances, narrators Cassandra Campbell, Gabrielle de Cuir, Kathe Mazur, and Stefan Rudnicki bring to life the diverse characters and tales that make this collection so powerful and entrancing. Each narrator brings a different but highly complementary style to the material, giving life and meaning to Jackson's characters and allowing listeners to appreciate the breadth of this work. Campbell's performance of 'The Lottery' is particularly satisfying. She uses an even, almost calming, tone that contrasts with terror of the story and allows it to develop to its unforgettable conclusion. As for the other stories, each qualifies as a superb second best. Winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award. -- AudioFile 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 currents...She was unique. -- Newsweek Jackson's great gift is not to create a world of fantasy and terror, but rather to discover the existence of the grotesque in the ordinary world. The grotesque is so powerful here just because it takes off from everyday life and constantly returns there until we do not know ourselves quite where we are. -- Elizabeth Janeway, author and literary critic The creepy, dangerous fiction of Jackson is brilliantly encapsulated by this quietly devastating story in which a community, following an unquestioned ritual of generations, wreaks havoc on itself--just as Schiff describes in her nonfiction account of a close-knit town, a tragedy, and the seemingly ever-present wish to inflict harm...The willingness to go along with, even participate, in disaster echoes the most disturbing aspects of the period Schiff recounts. -- Library Journal The stories remind one of the elemental terrors of childhood. -- International Herald Tribune The voice work of Cassandra Campbell, Gabrielle de Cuir, Kathe Mazur, and Stefan Rudnicki -- was...superb. The problem was that these stories were such breathtaking marvels that they made virtually everything...seem trivial and inconsequential. -- Washington Post

Author Information

Shirley Jackson was born in California in 1916. When her short story The Lottery was first published in the New Yorker in 1948, readers were so horrified they sent her hate mail; it has since become one of the most iconic American stories of all time. Her first novel, The Road Through the Wall, was published in the same year and was followed by Hangsaman, The Bird's Nest, The Sundial, The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, widely seen as her masterpiece. In addition to her dark, brilliant novels, she wrote lightly fictionalized magazine pieces about family life with her four children and her husband, the critic Stanley Edgar Hyman. Shirley Jackson died in 1965. Read by Cassandra Campbell, Gabrielle de Cuir, Richard Gilliland, Jamye Grant, Stephen Hoye, Alex Hyde-White, Sunil Malhotra, Arthur Morey, P. J. Ochlan, and Stefan Rudnicki Gabrielle de Cuir is a Grammy-nominated and Audie Award-winning producer whose narration credits include the voice of Valentine in Orson Scott Card's Ender novels, Ursula K. Le Guin's The Tombs of Atuan, and Natalie Angier's Woman, for which she was awarded AudioFile magazine's Golden Earphones Award. She lives in Los Angeles where she also directs theatre and presently has several projects in various stages of development for film. Performed by Kathe Mazur, Stefan Rudnicki, Joe Barrett, and Edward Asner Stefan Rudnicki is a Grammy-winning audiobook producer and an award-winning narrator who has won several Audie Awards and been named one of AudioFile's Golden Voices. Stefan's early singing career included choral and solo concerts at Carnegie Hall, Judson Hall, and Lincoln Center.

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