Let Me Tell You

New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings

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BY NPR • From the renowned author of “The Lottery” and The Haunting of Hill House, a spectacular volume of previously unpublished and uncollected stories, essays, and other writings.

Features “Family Treasures,” nominated for the Edgar Award for Best Short Story

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, and comic essays about her large, boisterous family. 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.

For the first time, this collection showcases 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.

Praise for Let Me Tell You

"Stunning."—O: The Oprah Magazine

"Let us now—at last—celebrate dangerous women writers: how cheering to see justice done with [this collection of] Shirley Jackson’s heretofore unpublished works—uniquely unsettling stories and ruthlessly barbed essays on domestic life."—Vanity Fair

"There are . . . times in reading [Jackson’s] accounts of desperate women in their thirties slowly going crazy that she seems an American Jean Rhys, other times when she rivals even Flannery O’Connor in her cool depictions of inhumanity and insidious cruelty, and still others when she matches Philip K. Dick at his most hallucinatory. At her best, though, she’s just incomparable."—The Washington Post

Excellent writing and narration

If you’ve never read Shirley Jackson you’re in for a treat. Known for her horror stories but in addition she is also a great comedic writer. I thoroughly enjoyed this book.

Surprise!

I enjoyed much of this book. I found some new stories I hadn't come across before. However the Erma Bombeck type essays and articles put me off. I don't like to think of Shirley Jackson as funny or overly entrenched in everyday life, like the rest of us. It's just my preference that she remain as the author of The Lottery or The Haunting, etc.

The narration is good and sarcastic enough in the essays and articles.

Not What I Was Expecting

Not what I’m was expecting and definitely a slog. Narrator was fine, but the stories were not exciting, let alone scary. Boring as sin, in my opinion. Very few books that I do not finish, but only made it halfway through this before giving up.