Happy 100th Birthday, Shirley Jackson!
Updates from the Shirley Jackson files, #16
Dear friends,
Today would have been Shirley Jackson's 100th birthday. Next Monday, December 19, the 92nd Street Y is hosting a celebration of Jackson's life and work to honor her centenary. I'll be reading, along with Joyce Carol Oates, Laura Miller, and Jackson's grandson Miles Hyman, who has just published a graphic novelization of "The Lottery." If you come, be sure to say hello!
If you had told me earlier this year that Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life would be reviewed by Charles McGrath, Zoë Heller, Elaine Showalter, and Joyce Carol Oates, I would never have believed it. The biography was a New York Times Notable Book and appears on "best of 2016" lists from Time, Entertainment Weekly, NPR, The Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune, and more. It's just come out in England, and yesterday I was interviewed for the BBC—the host discovered Jackson's writings last year and was quite taken with them.
It was wonderful to meet so many of you during my book tour, from the launch event at Greenlight Books to the wonderful party thrown by the Bennington Bookstore at the Park McCullough House in North Bennington. Although no one did show up with a potato kugel!
(The Park McCullough House, appropriately spooky the night of my reading.)
I'm so grateful to you, my wonderful readers, for your support for this book. Just for you, for the holiday season, I'm offering a special deal: if you'd like to order a personalized copy of Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, for yourself or for that special Shirley Jackson fan in your life, they're now only $35 (normally $40), postage included. But let me know as soon as possible, because my supply is limited.
Happy holidays to all --
Ruth
"No live organism can continue for long to exist under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream."—Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House