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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN num: 9780374529536
ISBN number: 0374529531
Label: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Manufacturer: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 320
Printing Date: March 16, 2005
Publishing house: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Release Date: March 09, 2005
Sale Popularity Level: 44826
Studio: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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Product Description:
The Lottery, one of the most terrifying stories written in this century, created a sensation when it was very first published in The New Yorker. 'Power and haunting,' and 'nights of unrest' were typical reader responses. This collection, the only one to appear during Shirley Jackson's lifetime, unites 'The Lottery:' with twenty-four equally unusual stories. Together they demonstrate Jack son's remarkable range--from the hilarious to the truly horrible--and power as a storyteller.
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Rated by buyers 
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Interesting and different to say the least; I had to put myself in that era and think carefully after each story to get a sense of where the author was coming from................
Rated by buyers 
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When Shirley Jackson's story "The Lottery" was very first published in the New Yorker in 1948 - post-war readers were horrified. Hundreds of them canceled their subscriptions and dozens more wrote scathing letters of indictment to the editors.
Mild-mannered Shirley Jackson had just ripped through the veneer of Small Town, USA and exposed the maggot-laden underbelly. Here Jackson gives us a portrait of an America nobody in 1948 was willing to see - not after the ticker-tape parades celebrating the defeat of the Nazis and Japanese. We were the heroes, after all, the good guys.
Nobody wanted to look into the mirror and see the dull, narrow-minded conformity hiding in plain sight on Main Street. But such was the well-mannered terror of Jackson's story. Jackson's premise - that good, hard-working folks would murder a neighbor in a barbaric ritual -- was so horrifying that many readers simply couldn't handle it.
In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle a few months after "The Lottery" was published, Jackson said: "Explaining just what I had hoped the story to say is very difficult. I suppose, I hoped, by setting a particularly brutal ancient rite in the present and in my own village to shock the story's readers with a graphic dramatization of the pointless violence and general inhumanity in their own lives."
Jackson's tale reads like a bland "day-in-the-life" story in a rather ordinary New England town. That's because Jackson lulls the reader into believing that herein lies an innocent story and not something so horribly twisted they will be cringing by the time they read the last paragraph. Notice in the very first paragraph how Jackson uses long sentences to help put the reader at easy and mimic the easy rambling style of an old Yankee narrator:
"The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day; the flower were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green. The people of the village began to gather in the square, between the post office and the bank, around ten o'clock; in some town there were so many people that the lottery took two days and had to started on June 2nd, but in this village, where there were only about three hundred people, the whole lottery took less than two hours, so it could begin at ten o'clock in the morning and still be through in time to allow the villagers to get home for noon dinner."
The story follows this pattern to the end. The reader feels like they have stepped into a small village and this lottery they are talking about is something like the square dances and church suppers that are held every Saturday night at the town hall. There's Old Man Warner complaining that the lottery "ain't what it used to be!" Dabnabit!
Everyone is so damn polite. Mr. Summers himself, running a bit late, declares, "Little late today, folks!" There's Mrs. Hutchinson so busy washing dishes that heck she completely forgot what day it was. "Thought my old man was out back stacking wood," she tells Mrs. Delacroix. "And then I looked out the window and the kids was gone, and then I remembered it was the twenty-seventh and came a-running."
She should have kept running.
There are sign posts along the way and it's enough to infuse the reader with a growing sense of unease. There's the boy, Bobby Martin, stuffing his pockets with stones and the other boys "selecting the smoothest and roundest stones." There's the dreaded grey box Mr. Summers carries into the square that causes a murmur in the crowd. There's the trepidation roiling through the crowd just before the drawing (strangely, the reader thinks, the prospect of winning this lottery doesn't seem to make folks happy).
The reader's hackles begin to rise when Mr. Adams and Old Man Warner begin to talk about other villages giving up the lottery. That nonsense gets Old Man Warner ranting about young folks and breaking tradition.
"`Next thing you know, they'll be wanting to go back to living in caves, nobody work any more, live that way for a while. Used to be a saying about `Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon.' First thing you know, we'd all be eating stewed chickweed and acorns. There's always been a lottery,' he added petulantly. `Bad enough to see young Joe Summers up there joking with everyone.'
`Some places have already quit lotteries,' Mr. Adams said.
`Nothing but trouble in that,' Old Man Warner said stoutly. `Pack of young fools.'"
Now the reader knows something is wrong, but not how wrong.
By the time Mr. Summers calls for everyone to be quick about it and they gather up the stones - giving Mrs. Hutchinson's toddler boy a rock to throw at his mother - and monstrously murdering her by stoning, the reader is slack jawed. You can feel the chill running down your spine - even after repeated readings.
That's ... Read More
Rated by buyers 
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The only bad thing I can say about this collection is that it makes me want to suffer head trauma so that I can forget the stories and read them again in their NEWNESS. Singing Shirley Jackson's praises is like pointing out the blueness of the sky. Just read this. It'll ruin you for all other writers, but in the most divine sense.
Rated by buyers -
As a fiction writer, this is the book I study. I can return to this book again and again, overwhelmed by Shirley Jackon's absolute, subtle brilliance. She writes with a smoothness and an ease that borders on the eerie. I could sing the praises of this book all night.
Rated by buyers -
My favourite living author of the offbeat, macabre story is Joyce Carol Oates. This prolific woman, who can seemingly pen an entire novel while having a bath, has compiled a formidable opus of stories which Alberto Manguel appropriately describes as Black Water stories. I haven't read any of her many other types of novel and short story, but if I were handing out Nobel prizes, I would grab back any of the prizes handed out in the last twenty years (they seem to be awarded on the basis of some kind of quota system) and give it to Ms Oates. But before Joyce Carol Oates there was Shirley Jackson. We've all read The Lottery in high school, and even though I was intrigued and appalled by this story at the time, I didn't seek out more Jackson for a long time, partly I think because I thought my English teacher would approve. Just as well, because I think I am better able to appreciate her now that I am older and society and life in general has become more suspect for me.
Jackson died when she was 48 years of age, a victim to depression, drink, amphetamines, and chocolate. She was married to a university professor and lived at a time when America was expanding and exporting its robust, cocksure culture to the world. All of the stories in The Lottery and Other Stories were published in the 1940s. New York City was the true capital of North America and fast becoming the capital of the world. In these stories the hypocrisy behind the blithe optimism and manifest destiny of American culture is deftly portrayed. Many conservative, nostalgic thinkers and politicians evoke this time as being a golden age, a time that our current debauched, rudderless culture should aspire to. Jackson, a literary fifth columnist, doesn't appear to have embraced any of it. She skewers the racism, sexism, materialism and violence of the times -the glitter turns out to have been cheap paint after all- and she does so in simple straight forward slice of life stories, and, more devastatingly, in allegorical, nightmarish tales -The Lottery, The Tooth, and The Daemon Lover, etc.
The Lottery -Its about atavism, superstition -about responding to the mystery, insecurity, and danger of life by making human sacrifices to the vulpine forces of nature in order to presumably save the majority through a kind of magical inoculation. This type of thinking is the antithesis of science. It is ancient, 'old brain' thinking and it shares a lot with some 'new age' thinking. I think it is also why we can sometimes justify sending our young people off to die in pointless wars in foreign countries. It is about unthinking adherence to ritual. It is about compartmentalizing our emotions and behaviour -allowing friendship and compassion to co-exist with murderous cruelty, in the same person, in the same community. The veneer of civilization is not that thick or that strong. Civilization is a modern, stylish bungalow, built over a deep, ancient dungeon, where savagery and perhaps evil still walks, and periodically comes up the damp winding staircase -witness the unspeakable atrocities on both sides of recent and current conflicts (e.g. Kosovo, Rwanda, Iraq.) No wonder this story generated the most mail of any story ever published in the New Yorker. It is truly disturbing. Bridge with the girls, or baseball and a few beers with boys wouldn't seem the same after reading this story.
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