Why did I love this book?
For anyone who’s ever read and enjoyed Shirley Jackson’s work, this book is a treasure. It contains previously unpublished essays, short stories, musings, and even drawings by the author of The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle.
The stories are quintessential Jackson: eerie, poignant, sometimes funny, always memorable, and each is very different from the next. Jackson writes about her kids, her husband, her house, and the mundane in a way that’s charming and relatable.
Her stories touch on subjects from distrust to marital harmony (sometimes these topics are two sides of the same coin!) to the supernatural to the game of bridge. She was a truly gifted and extremely skilled writer—how thrilling to be able to read these pieces.
1 author picked Let Me Tell You as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
From the peerless author of The Lottery and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, this is a treasure trove of deliciously dark and funny stories, essays, lectures, letters and drawings.
Let Me Tell You brings together the brilliantly eerie short stories Jackson is best known for with frank and inspiring lectures on writing; comic essays she wrote about her large, rowdy family; and revelatory personal letters and drawings. Jackson's landscape here is most frequently domestic - dinner parties, children's games and neighbourly gossip - but one that is continually threatened and subverted in her unsettling, inimitable prose. This collection…