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Just an Ordinary Day
The stories in this edition represent the great diversity of her work, from humor to her shocking explorations of the human psyche. The tales range, chronologically, from the writings of her college days and residence in Greenwich Village in the early 1940s, to the unforgettably chilling stories from the period just before her death. They provide an exciting overview of the evolution of her craft through a progression of forms and styles, and add significantly to the body of her published work.
Just an Ordinary Day is a testament to how large a talent Shirley Jackson had and to the depth, breadth, and complexity of her writing. Though this remarkable literary life was cut short, Jackson clearly established a unique voice that has won a permanent place in the canon of outstanding American literature, and remains a powerful influence on generations of readers and writers.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
Just an Ordinary Day is a testament to how large a talent Shirley Jackson had and to the depth, breadth, and complexity of her writing. Though this remarkable literary life was cut short, Jackson clearly established a unique voice that has won a permanent place in the canon of outstanding American literature, and remains a powerful influence on generations of readers and writers.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
496 pages, Paperback
First published December 1, 1996
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4413 people want to read
About the author
Shirley Jackson
340 books11.2k followersShirley Jackson was an influential American author. A popular writer in her time, her work has received increasing attention from literary critics in recent years. She has influenced such writers as Stephen King, Nigel Kneale, and Richard Matheson.
She is best known for her dystopian short story, "The Lottery" (1948), which suggests there is a deeply unsettling underside to bucolic, smalltown America. In her critical biography of Shirley Jackson, Lenemaja Friedman notes that when Shirley Jackson's story "The Lottery" was published in the June 28, 1948, issue of The New Yorker, it received a response that "no New Yorker story had ever received." Hundreds of letters poured in that were characterized by, as Jackson put it, "bewilderment, speculation and old-fashioned abuse."
Jackson's husband, the literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, wrote in his preface to a posthumous anthology of her work that "she consistently refused to be interviewed, to explain or promote her work in any fashion, or to take public stands and be the pundit of the Sunday supplements. She believed that her books would speak for her clearly enough over the years." Hyman insisted the darker aspects of Jackson's works were not, as some critics claimed, the product of "personal, even neurotic, fantasies", but that Jackson intended, as "a sensitive and faithful anatomy of our times, fitting symbols for our distressing world of the concentration camp and the Bomb", to mirror humanity's Cold War-era fears. Jackson may even have taken pleasure in the subversive impact of her work, as revealed by Hyman's statement that she "was always proud that the Union of South Africa banned The Lottery', and she felt that they at least understood the story".
In 1965, Jackson died of heart failure in her sleep, at her home in North Bennington Vermont, at the age of 48.
She is best known for her dystopian short story, "The Lottery" (1948), which suggests there is a deeply unsettling underside to bucolic, smalltown America. In her critical biography of Shirley Jackson, Lenemaja Friedman notes that when Shirley Jackson's story "The Lottery" was published in the June 28, 1948, issue of The New Yorker, it received a response that "no New Yorker story had ever received." Hundreds of letters poured in that were characterized by, as Jackson put it, "bewilderment, speculation and old-fashioned abuse."
Jackson's husband, the literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, wrote in his preface to a posthumous anthology of her work that "she consistently refused to be interviewed, to explain or promote her work in any fashion, or to take public stands and be the pundit of the Sunday supplements. She believed that her books would speak for her clearly enough over the years." Hyman insisted the darker aspects of Jackson's works were not, as some critics claimed, the product of "personal, even neurotic, fantasies", but that Jackson intended, as "a sensitive and faithful anatomy of our times, fitting symbols for our distressing world of the concentration camp and the Bomb", to mirror humanity's Cold War-era fears. Jackson may even have taken pleasure in the subversive impact of her work, as revealed by Hyman's statement that she "was always proud that the Union of South Africa banned The Lottery', and she felt that they at least understood the story".
In 1965, Jackson died of heart failure in her sleep, at her home in North Bennington Vermont, at the age of 48.
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July 27, 2019
I thoroughly enjoyed this collection* of previously unpublished and uncollected stories. They range from fictionalized humorous, irreverently told, family anecdotes; to a tale of bigotry and intolerance as chilling (and still relevant) as anything Jackson has written; to a story whose first paragraph misleads you when it turns into one of the most delightful stories you’ve read; to the last that seems to be revenge upon a certain type of New England villager Jackson probably knew.
A couple of the stories have the same surreal, nightmarish plot; but they are different enough in tone that it’s not bothersome. Also included are two very different versions of the same story (a Bluebeard retelling)—both good, the second better—that would be useful in a writing class.
As a longtime Shirley Jackson fan, I first started this book shortly after it was published, then set it aside after reading only a few stories for who-knows-what reason. Having recently reread The Lottery and Other Stories, I craved more Jackson so picked this up again. I didn’t want to set it aside this time. I have other volumes of her work waiting for me and I am anxious to get to them.
* Unlike the other collection I’m currently reading: am I right, Howard?
A couple of the stories have the same surreal, nightmarish plot; but they are different enough in tone that it’s not bothersome. Also included are two very different versions of the same story (a Bluebeard retelling)—both good, the second better—that would be useful in a writing class.
As a longtime Shirley Jackson fan, I first started this book shortly after it was published, then set it aside after reading only a few stories for who-knows-what reason. Having recently reread The Lottery and Other Stories, I craved more Jackson so picked this up again. I didn’t want to set it aside this time. I have other volumes of her work waiting for me and I am anxious to get to them.
* Unlike the other collection I’m currently reading: am I right, Howard?
November 25, 2013
IT'S A LONG REVIEW FOLKS, BUT WORTH IT!
What a fascinating collection! Perhaps not a good choice for an idle reader of Jackson looking for something to chew on after "The Lottery" (that choice would be The Lottery: Adventures of the Demon Lover or possibly The Magic of Shirley Jackson - I have not read the latter) but for those who have commenced through the superb The Haunting of Hill House and the wondrous We Have Always Lived in the Castle and are wondering what to read next - here's a solid option. And the interesting thing is that it will give you both what you *want* out of Jackson while also challenging your perceptions of her as a writer... and how you take that challenge will depend on your tastes.
The concept is fairly easy - this is half a collection of Jackson's short fiction that has previously been uncollected, and half a collection drawn from a box of manuscripts discovered after her death. And that's where the really interesting part comes in - what are these pieces? Juvenilia? In at least once case, certainly. But they also comprise experiments and rough drafts and unpolished texts and almost certainly works intended to be returned to but abandoned. To some, this will make half the book less than worthwhile but such a dismissive attitude will seriously undermine your enjoyment. If you're interested in a great writer's works, or are a writer yourself, you can certainly gain quite a bit by reading these texts - and make no mistake, they are all complete texts (well, one actually is thoroughly undeveloped but still "whole", if you get my meaning) - and gain respect for Jackson's talent and scope.
The most productive way to group these stories for review (and, yes, I'm going to review them all, as is my wont - it will be long) is into two tones - The Light and The Dark - and this itself is generally informative because it's good to be reminded (unless one has read Raising Demons or Life Among the Savages) that Jackson was not a "horror" writer but instead was a lit writer with interests that embraced both sides of the human equation. And she was a working short fiction writer who wrote stories to sell to magazines. So, again, if you think you'd only be interested in Jackson's dark work here, well... this review can serve as a guide and that's your prerogative, but you'll be missing the opportunity to read a top writer in solid control of her craft turning out some funny and powerful work that will broaden your conception of writing. Not all of it is successful of course, but that's why I write these reviews. Among Jackson's strengths was her economy of words and observation skills, her "sharpness" (for lack of a better word) - and the weaker of the abandoned texts are work that hasn't been properly stropped to a fine edge yet, or whose focus is unclear and undeveloped (and occasionally, so cut back as to be a little too spare on story hooks).
So let's start with The Light. Jackson had obvious interests/concerns/themes as a writer that she repeatedly made her focus. Men and women and their relationships, boys and girls and how their minds develop, family dynamics, social status and interpersonal interactions and class - these are themes that turn up again and again. And these are usually subtly explored in a number of ways from differing viewpoints. Sometimes out-and-out comedy, sometime wry neutrality or charming tale-spinning. Quite a number of them were written for, and published in, women's magazines of the time like "Mademoiselle", "Woman's Home Companion" and "Good Housekeeping".
As I said, not everything here is excellent - even with the caveat framing of half being abandoned texts. So let's get those out of the way first. "When Barry Was Seven" is the only throw-away here - essentially a humorous transcript of a discussion about books and reading between Jackson and her husband and their young son - it reads like placeholder notes for Raising Demons. "I Don't Kiss Strangers" seems an early experiment in sharpening Jackson's dialogue skills and centers on a break-up between a college-age couple. In "The Very Hot Sun In Bermuda" a flirty college girl has an extended discussion with the married painter she's having an affair with. I'm guessing the point is the contrast between the passionate devotion of painter (who will likely have his marriage destroyed and lose his children) and the girl's treatment of the whole thing as a romantic lark (likely pursued to gain her an easy painting for her art class that she can pass off as her own work). But that's me guessing. "Deck The Halls" seems to be about class consciousness and a good deed performed on Christmas Eve. Fine but bland, as there's no conflict or real humor, rather Hallmark-card-y. "On The House" is something like a Raymond Carver piece - a blind man and his young wife scam a liquor store cashier out of some money - perhaps it was an experiment in a different approach (although this was a published piece) but it didn't work for me. "Little Old Lady In Great Need" is somewhat similar to the preceding story - set during the war-rationing years it has a very proper, upper class great-grandmother instruct her young daughter on how a real Lady *should* and *shouldn't* behave as she bargains a butcher out of the only piece of meat he has in the shop, his own evening's steak. Okay but nothing to write home about. "Alone In A Den Of Cubs" is a light domestic comedy about being Den-mother to a Cub Scout troop and observations on how young boys' minds work. Again, pretty slight but not unenjoyable. "The Omen" reuses elements from some darker tales (leaving your life to chance and a random encounter with a street advertising campaign) and tells of a woman, faced with a matrimonial problem, who decides to use a randomly acquired list of strange notations to drive her movements and thus let fate answer the question. Light, cute, thin.
On a slightly better (if still somewhat problematic) level are stories like: "Party Of Boys" which is similar to "Cubs" - as it has a suburban mother put in charge of a gaggle of young kids she must wrangle (and thus puts it in the orbit of Life Among the Savages) - but adds a level of subtle but pointed class observation as the mom discovers that the town ne're-do-well shares her son's birthday (and nobody is going to throw that juvenile delinquent a party!). Funny and well done. "The Sister" is a bit like a humorous, barbed, drawing-room sketch by Saki as an adult brother and sister (she marrying below her station, he secretly married below his station) wrangle in the family dynamic. Cute. "Portrait" is one of those pieces that someone else will have to decipher for me as it's another experiment - little scenes interspersed with lines from a poem or song. Possibly of interest for fans of Merricat (from We Have Always Lived in the Castle) with the line "they want me to comb my hair". "Gnarly, The King Of The Jungle" is an odd story about a spoiled young girl who uses her extra-special birthday present as an intermediary to take petty revenge on the put-upon housemaid. More class concerns, certainly, but it's hard to see the point as nothing more than "spoiled little girls can be cruel", unless it's more subtle than I'm giving it credit for and went right over my head. "My Recollections Of S.B. Fairchild" is a domestic comedy written in a dry, droll, understated way - a record of the purchase of a tape-recorder (a big ticket item at the time) that subsequently breaks and how department store bureaucracy sets in motion a domino chain of frustrating correspondence. Funny. "My Uncle In The Garden" is a cute modern fable involving a visit to the country cottage of two doddering, somewhat cantankerous relatives, one of whom has made an unthoughtful, if minor, deal with the Devil (who seems a rather understanding chap, although he never appears in the story proper). If the final payoff of the plot of "Mrs. Melville Makes A Purchase" is familiar as a well-circulated urban legend, the execution is excellent (although, second caveat, perhaps a bit too long) and it contains some very funny writing as a stuffy, fussy, wealthy woman goes shopping among the lesser folk. Some awful members of the literati congregate during the imminent death of a literary giant in the acidic "A Great Voice Stilled" but they're all more concerned with themselves - nice social observation and wry comedy.
There are a number of good solid "Light" stories as well. The first of the previously unknown pieces, "The Smoking Room", is a fun deal-with-the-Devil story in which a smart young college girl outwits Old Nick (yet again) with some legal chicanery. "Summer Afternoon" shows Jackson's mastery of evoking the mindset of children as two little girls tour the neighborhood - the interesting thing about this story is that it just might be a very, very subtle ghost story as well! "Indians Live In Tents" is similar to "Fairchild" above - an epistolary tale, this one charting the cause-and-effect relations between a group of unrelated people leasing and subleasing rooms and furniture from each other - funny and an interesting window into how people got on with the process of living at a certain moment in time. "Dinner For A Gentleman" and "Family Magician" are similar stories, both frothy domestic comedies somewhat like Mary Poppins or Thorne Smith's work but with household magic themes (and presaging popular versions of the same, like I DREAM OF JEANNIE, BEWITCHED and NANNY AND THE PROFESSOR). In the first a young woman gets magical help in preparing a meal for an eligible suitor and in the second a fatherless family has a wonderfully magical maid enter their lives. Charming. The equally funny "Arch Criminal" is a somewhat more savage take on DENNIS THE MENACE, specifically about how mothers can be completely blind to their son's less than wholesome qualities when they've got criminal mischief and false repentance down to an art. One of the nice aspects of a story like "Come To The Fair" is that since Jackson gets dark writing about women on the route to spinsterhood, an unexpected upbeat ending gives you a splendid surprise - and this piece about a lonely, middle-aged teacher being forced into reading fortunes at the community charity fair (and discovering hidden talents in herself and being rewarded for it by fate) is very nice indeed. "My Grandmother And The World Of Cats" is also interesting in this respect - another cute domestic comedy about an old lady's problematic relationship with the long list of felines in her life, it ends on an oddly serious and possibly even dark note with just one turn of phrase. "Maybe It Was The Car" should be read by all women who are both mothers and writers as it sketches out a probably very familiar instinct that takes hold of you when you just need to escape your domestic role and inject a little creative adventure into your life. "The Wishing Dime" is about exactly that item and what two little girls do with it - Jackson has a real talent for capturing small details of family and domestic life and dialogue, which also comes out in "About Two Nice People", where mistiming and unfortunate minor circumstances can bring two people together in something resembling anger but which turns out to be love. "I.O.U." has an attempt by an old women to work out a debt with some small children over a destroyed garden blossom into a whole new commerce system in a small town - one that grows exponentially and brings the community together - very nice! "The Most Wonderful Thing", on the other hand, is both human and profoundly sad, as two women (one middle-aged and one young) share a hospital room together because of birthing problems. This story also has an extremely wonderful small moment near its end involving the room nurse that I greatly appreciated.
Jackson dabbles with the supernatural in "The Very Strange House Next Door" (aka "Strangers In Town") which has a subtly Addams Family-esque household (or perhaps they're related to Bradbury's "Elliots") move into a conservative little New England town. The maid acts strangely (on top of the family even *having* a maid - which is shocking in itself), the family has odd furniture, they're vegetarians and maybe their cat talks as well. Such benign and innocuous strangeness cannot stand and the blue-blooded biddies of the hypocritical gossip committee soon get to work driving wonder out of the town. Charming, but the small-town venom is so stingingly drawn it burns a bit.
The best story on the "Light" side here is undoubtedly "Journey With A Lady". A nine-year-old boy makes his first train trip by himself and ends up talking to, and unexpectedly helping out, an interesting lady with a secret. Charming, compact, with the usual excellent eye for children's dialogue and thought processes, this story deserves to be better known.
And then there's "The Dark" side of Shirley Jackson's short fiction. It's undeniable that Jackson's problems with depression and melancholia informed her work, as did her fascination with social and familial dynamics. Hypocrisy and resentment also recur again and again. She seems fascinated not just by men and women but why men kill women, and why women kill men and why lovers kill each other and why people kill strangers and why humans hurt each other in cruel ways. And she couldn't stop herself writing about it, sometimes in painfully honest psychological detail and sometimes in odd bemusement.
The weakest of these stories are experiments in other forms. "Devil Of A Tale" is a flash-fiction like parable about a deal between The Devil and a woman that will produce an heir for the Prince of Darkness. Despite her cagey planning, though, the woman's plans are undone by the simple truth that some sons just don't love their mothers. Slight. "Lord Of The Castle" shows Jackson experimenting with the Gothic style (which she obviously liked reading) but all that this story (about a a noblemen burned at the stake, his vengeful son, a previously unknown brother, the castle on the hill and some Satanic rituals) proves is that Gothics do not work when stripped back into Jackson's terse style. An interesting, oddly bloodless failure.
"The Mouse" has a husband's life run by his domineering wife until their new abode proves to have problems with vermin - nothing really changes except his realization of just how cruel his spouse is. Unremarkable but it has some nice dialogue work. "Before Autumn" is one of those Jackson stories that is *so* stripped back that you finish it wondering if you've missed the point (perhaps indicative of why it ended up in a box) - what we initially take as a woman planning an affair with a teenage handyman may actually be her plotting her husband's indirect murder. An interesting idea, imperfectly executed. The most surprisingly uneven story here is "The Missing Girl", something I've been looking forward to reading since I'd heard it was inspired by the real world disappearance of a Bennington, Vermont student in 1946 (see here) which also inspired Jackson's novel Hangsaman, which I haven't read. Reset to a girl's summer camp, "Missing" has an oddly absurd and comic tone on the surface (all the counselors and troops are named after various fairy tale and children's story characters) but underneath is a recurrent dark and bleak Jackson theme - the girl/woman who left so little impression on those around her that she seems to have barely existed at all (see also Eleanor Vance from The Haunting of Hill House). It's not a bad story, just not what I was expecting and a bit underwhelming.
**PLEASE SEE FIRST COMMENT BELOW FOR THE CONTINUATION, INCLUDING ALL THE GOOD, NASTY STUFF!**
What a fascinating collection! Perhaps not a good choice for an idle reader of Jackson looking for something to chew on after "The Lottery" (that choice would be The Lottery: Adventures of the Demon Lover or possibly The Magic of Shirley Jackson - I have not read the latter) but for those who have commenced through the superb The Haunting of Hill House and the wondrous We Have Always Lived in the Castle and are wondering what to read next - here's a solid option. And the interesting thing is that it will give you both what you *want* out of Jackson while also challenging your perceptions of her as a writer... and how you take that challenge will depend on your tastes.
The concept is fairly easy - this is half a collection of Jackson's short fiction that has previously been uncollected, and half a collection drawn from a box of manuscripts discovered after her death. And that's where the really interesting part comes in - what are these pieces? Juvenilia? In at least once case, certainly. But they also comprise experiments and rough drafts and unpolished texts and almost certainly works intended to be returned to but abandoned. To some, this will make half the book less than worthwhile but such a dismissive attitude will seriously undermine your enjoyment. If you're interested in a great writer's works, or are a writer yourself, you can certainly gain quite a bit by reading these texts - and make no mistake, they are all complete texts (well, one actually is thoroughly undeveloped but still "whole", if you get my meaning) - and gain respect for Jackson's talent and scope.
The most productive way to group these stories for review (and, yes, I'm going to review them all, as is my wont - it will be long) is into two tones - The Light and The Dark - and this itself is generally informative because it's good to be reminded (unless one has read Raising Demons or Life Among the Savages) that Jackson was not a "horror" writer but instead was a lit writer with interests that embraced both sides of the human equation. And she was a working short fiction writer who wrote stories to sell to magazines. So, again, if you think you'd only be interested in Jackson's dark work here, well... this review can serve as a guide and that's your prerogative, but you'll be missing the opportunity to read a top writer in solid control of her craft turning out some funny and powerful work that will broaden your conception of writing. Not all of it is successful of course, but that's why I write these reviews. Among Jackson's strengths was her economy of words and observation skills, her "sharpness" (for lack of a better word) - and the weaker of the abandoned texts are work that hasn't been properly stropped to a fine edge yet, or whose focus is unclear and undeveloped (and occasionally, so cut back as to be a little too spare on story hooks).
So let's start with The Light. Jackson had obvious interests/concerns/themes as a writer that she repeatedly made her focus. Men and women and their relationships, boys and girls and how their minds develop, family dynamics, social status and interpersonal interactions and class - these are themes that turn up again and again. And these are usually subtly explored in a number of ways from differing viewpoints. Sometimes out-and-out comedy, sometime wry neutrality or charming tale-spinning. Quite a number of them were written for, and published in, women's magazines of the time like "Mademoiselle", "Woman's Home Companion" and "Good Housekeeping".
As I said, not everything here is excellent - even with the caveat framing of half being abandoned texts. So let's get those out of the way first. "When Barry Was Seven" is the only throw-away here - essentially a humorous transcript of a discussion about books and reading between Jackson and her husband and their young son - it reads like placeholder notes for Raising Demons. "I Don't Kiss Strangers" seems an early experiment in sharpening Jackson's dialogue skills and centers on a break-up between a college-age couple. In "The Very Hot Sun In Bermuda" a flirty college girl has an extended discussion with the married painter she's having an affair with. I'm guessing the point is the contrast between the passionate devotion of painter (who will likely have his marriage destroyed and lose his children) and the girl's treatment of the whole thing as a romantic lark (likely pursued to gain her an easy painting for her art class that she can pass off as her own work). But that's me guessing. "Deck The Halls" seems to be about class consciousness and a good deed performed on Christmas Eve. Fine but bland, as there's no conflict or real humor, rather Hallmark-card-y. "On The House" is something like a Raymond Carver piece - a blind man and his young wife scam a liquor store cashier out of some money - perhaps it was an experiment in a different approach (although this was a published piece) but it didn't work for me. "Little Old Lady In Great Need" is somewhat similar to the preceding story - set during the war-rationing years it has a very proper, upper class great-grandmother instruct her young daughter on how a real Lady *should* and *shouldn't* behave as she bargains a butcher out of the only piece of meat he has in the shop, his own evening's steak. Okay but nothing to write home about. "Alone In A Den Of Cubs" is a light domestic comedy about being Den-mother to a Cub Scout troop and observations on how young boys' minds work. Again, pretty slight but not unenjoyable. "The Omen" reuses elements from some darker tales (leaving your life to chance and a random encounter with a street advertising campaign) and tells of a woman, faced with a matrimonial problem, who decides to use a randomly acquired list of strange notations to drive her movements and thus let fate answer the question. Light, cute, thin.
On a slightly better (if still somewhat problematic) level are stories like: "Party Of Boys" which is similar to "Cubs" - as it has a suburban mother put in charge of a gaggle of young kids she must wrangle (and thus puts it in the orbit of Life Among the Savages) - but adds a level of subtle but pointed class observation as the mom discovers that the town ne're-do-well shares her son's birthday (and nobody is going to throw that juvenile delinquent a party!). Funny and well done. "The Sister" is a bit like a humorous, barbed, drawing-room sketch by Saki as an adult brother and sister (she marrying below her station, he secretly married below his station) wrangle in the family dynamic. Cute. "Portrait" is one of those pieces that someone else will have to decipher for me as it's another experiment - little scenes interspersed with lines from a poem or song. Possibly of interest for fans of Merricat (from We Have Always Lived in the Castle) with the line "they want me to comb my hair". "Gnarly, The King Of The Jungle" is an odd story about a spoiled young girl who uses her extra-special birthday present as an intermediary to take petty revenge on the put-upon housemaid. More class concerns, certainly, but it's hard to see the point as nothing more than "spoiled little girls can be cruel", unless it's more subtle than I'm giving it credit for and went right over my head. "My Recollections Of S.B. Fairchild" is a domestic comedy written in a dry, droll, understated way - a record of the purchase of a tape-recorder (a big ticket item at the time) that subsequently breaks and how department store bureaucracy sets in motion a domino chain of frustrating correspondence. Funny. "My Uncle In The Garden" is a cute modern fable involving a visit to the country cottage of two doddering, somewhat cantankerous relatives, one of whom has made an unthoughtful, if minor, deal with the Devil (who seems a rather understanding chap, although he never appears in the story proper). If the final payoff of the plot of "Mrs. Melville Makes A Purchase" is familiar as a well-circulated urban legend, the execution is excellent (although, second caveat, perhaps a bit too long) and it contains some very funny writing as a stuffy, fussy, wealthy woman goes shopping among the lesser folk. Some awful members of the literati congregate during the imminent death of a literary giant in the acidic "A Great Voice Stilled" but they're all more concerned with themselves - nice social observation and wry comedy.
There are a number of good solid "Light" stories as well. The first of the previously unknown pieces, "The Smoking Room", is a fun deal-with-the-Devil story in which a smart young college girl outwits Old Nick (yet again) with some legal chicanery. "Summer Afternoon" shows Jackson's mastery of evoking the mindset of children as two little girls tour the neighborhood - the interesting thing about this story is that it just might be a very, very subtle ghost story as well! "Indians Live In Tents" is similar to "Fairchild" above - an epistolary tale, this one charting the cause-and-effect relations between a group of unrelated people leasing and subleasing rooms and furniture from each other - funny and an interesting window into how people got on with the process of living at a certain moment in time. "Dinner For A Gentleman" and "Family Magician" are similar stories, both frothy domestic comedies somewhat like Mary Poppins or Thorne Smith's work but with household magic themes (and presaging popular versions of the same, like I DREAM OF JEANNIE, BEWITCHED and NANNY AND THE PROFESSOR). In the first a young woman gets magical help in preparing a meal for an eligible suitor and in the second a fatherless family has a wonderfully magical maid enter their lives. Charming. The equally funny "Arch Criminal" is a somewhat more savage take on DENNIS THE MENACE, specifically about how mothers can be completely blind to their son's less than wholesome qualities when they've got criminal mischief and false repentance down to an art. One of the nice aspects of a story like "Come To The Fair" is that since Jackson gets dark writing about women on the route to spinsterhood, an unexpected upbeat ending gives you a splendid surprise - and this piece about a lonely, middle-aged teacher being forced into reading fortunes at the community charity fair (and discovering hidden talents in herself and being rewarded for it by fate) is very nice indeed. "My Grandmother And The World Of Cats" is also interesting in this respect - another cute domestic comedy about an old lady's problematic relationship with the long list of felines in her life, it ends on an oddly serious and possibly even dark note with just one turn of phrase. "Maybe It Was The Car" should be read by all women who are both mothers and writers as it sketches out a probably very familiar instinct that takes hold of you when you just need to escape your domestic role and inject a little creative adventure into your life. "The Wishing Dime" is about exactly that item and what two little girls do with it - Jackson has a real talent for capturing small details of family and domestic life and dialogue, which also comes out in "About Two Nice People", where mistiming and unfortunate minor circumstances can bring two people together in something resembling anger but which turns out to be love. "I.O.U." has an attempt by an old women to work out a debt with some small children over a destroyed garden blossom into a whole new commerce system in a small town - one that grows exponentially and brings the community together - very nice! "The Most Wonderful Thing", on the other hand, is both human and profoundly sad, as two women (one middle-aged and one young) share a hospital room together because of birthing problems. This story also has an extremely wonderful small moment near its end involving the room nurse that I greatly appreciated.
Jackson dabbles with the supernatural in "The Very Strange House Next Door" (aka "Strangers In Town") which has a subtly Addams Family-esque household (or perhaps they're related to Bradbury's "Elliots") move into a conservative little New England town. The maid acts strangely (on top of the family even *having* a maid - which is shocking in itself), the family has odd furniture, they're vegetarians and maybe their cat talks as well. Such benign and innocuous strangeness cannot stand and the blue-blooded biddies of the hypocritical gossip committee soon get to work driving wonder out of the town. Charming, but the small-town venom is so stingingly drawn it burns a bit.
The best story on the "Light" side here is undoubtedly "Journey With A Lady". A nine-year-old boy makes his first train trip by himself and ends up talking to, and unexpectedly helping out, an interesting lady with a secret. Charming, compact, with the usual excellent eye for children's dialogue and thought processes, this story deserves to be better known.
And then there's "The Dark" side of Shirley Jackson's short fiction. It's undeniable that Jackson's problems with depression and melancholia informed her work, as did her fascination with social and familial dynamics. Hypocrisy and resentment also recur again and again. She seems fascinated not just by men and women but why men kill women, and why women kill men and why lovers kill each other and why people kill strangers and why humans hurt each other in cruel ways. And she couldn't stop herself writing about it, sometimes in painfully honest psychological detail and sometimes in odd bemusement.
The weakest of these stories are experiments in other forms. "Devil Of A Tale" is a flash-fiction like parable about a deal between The Devil and a woman that will produce an heir for the Prince of Darkness. Despite her cagey planning, though, the woman's plans are undone by the simple truth that some sons just don't love their mothers. Slight. "Lord Of The Castle" shows Jackson experimenting with the Gothic style (which she obviously liked reading) but all that this story (about a a noblemen burned at the stake, his vengeful son, a previously unknown brother, the castle on the hill and some Satanic rituals) proves is that Gothics do not work when stripped back into Jackson's terse style. An interesting, oddly bloodless failure.
"The Mouse" has a husband's life run by his domineering wife until their new abode proves to have problems with vermin - nothing really changes except his realization of just how cruel his spouse is. Unremarkable but it has some nice dialogue work. "Before Autumn" is one of those Jackson stories that is *so* stripped back that you finish it wondering if you've missed the point (perhaps indicative of why it ended up in a box) - what we initially take as a woman planning an affair with a teenage handyman may actually be her plotting her husband's indirect murder. An interesting idea, imperfectly executed. The most surprisingly uneven story here is "The Missing Girl", something I've been looking forward to reading since I'd heard it was inspired by the real world disappearance of a Bennington, Vermont student in 1946 (see here) which also inspired Jackson's novel Hangsaman, which I haven't read. Reset to a girl's summer camp, "Missing" has an oddly absurd and comic tone on the surface (all the counselors and troops are named after various fairy tale and children's story characters) but underneath is a recurrent dark and bleak Jackson theme - the girl/woman who left so little impression on those around her that she seems to have barely existed at all (see also Eleanor Vance from The Haunting of Hill House). It's not a bad story, just not what I was expecting and a bit underwhelming.
**PLEASE SEE FIRST COMMENT BELOW FOR THE CONTINUATION, INCLUDING ALL THE GOOD, NASTY STUFF!**
March 14, 2022
How could you go wrong with the unofficial Literary Mistress of the American Gothic? Seriously. The greatest revelation here is that all her unpublished work resonates louder and more audaciously than her published short stories (in magazines). The stuff of hers that's been unearthed by her children to fill up the first half of "...Ordinary Day" is incredible. The stuff that got published usually revolves around white upper class all American women--their neurosis may have very well evolved into the infamous "Karen" model of modern times. The range in these unpublished works goes from "Mother's gone batty again" to broad strokes of murder or at least the simple stages of a psychotic breakdown.
A vignette that reeks of Jackson: An antique dagger on the kitchen table (the husband looks at it and thinks of killing his wife); a little girl in a summer dress looks at us innocently, because a disembodied voice tells her to. All is pregnant with dread....!
The terrors in letter exchanges (epistolary stories that pretend to be about business but are really about inhumanity), household (womanly) chores and the tedium of these; childcare, communion with spirits and demons (the Devil makes a cameo TWICE!), senseless citywide scavenger hunts. Marriage. Shirley Jackson makes us scared of these "American" conventions, and this works acknowledges just how easy true genius can be left unpublished...
A vignette that reeks of Jackson: An antique dagger on the kitchen table (the husband looks at it and thinks of killing his wife); a little girl in a summer dress looks at us innocently, because a disembodied voice tells her to. All is pregnant with dread....!
The terrors in letter exchanges (epistolary stories that pretend to be about business but are really about inhumanity), household (womanly) chores and the tedium of these; childcare, communion with spirits and demons (the Devil makes a cameo TWICE!), senseless citywide scavenger hunts. Marriage. Shirley Jackson makes us scared of these "American" conventions, and this works acknowledges just how easy true genius can be left unpublished...
December 14, 2023
This is a strange and unusual collection. Jackson’s children found a box of their mother’s unpublished stories decades after her death. Thirty of them are included here, along with 22 additional stories that were only published once. I believe they span almost the whole of her writing career, the last story coming out after her death. This is not a great intro to her work--some of the stories are, well, the kind you’d put away in a box. But to a Jackson fan like me, taken as a whole, this is revelatory and inspiring.
The fun part was immersing myself in her style. Just like with The Lottery (though not as good, obviously), I noticed she disarms you with her regularness, and then lays something crazy on you. I’m just like you, but look what I see! I love the title for that reason. It’s just an ordinary day, but Shirley sees something different in it. That’s not to say these are supernatural or spooky stories. Only one or two come close to that. But they do explore humanities odd, quirky side. Many are kind of like her Life Among the Savages, only as if she wrote them not caring who would read them, which made them scandalously fun.
The first story was one of my favorites, The Smoking Room , where you learn you can trick the devil with words.
The best spooky one was Summer Afternoon , about two pre-school aged girls and a ghost.
The Very Hot Sun in Bermuda - man, this one sounded like an exposé of her husband’s flings with his students. Ouch!
And I loved how Shirley, the 1950’s housewife, wrote a number of stories with mysteriously magical helpers that came into the home and took care of meals and children and kept everything together.
Several stories made me think Shirley was more like Eleanor in The Haunting of Hill House than I may have imagined. She grew up very much an outsider in an affluent suburb of San Francisco that I know well, and I suspect the small towns she included in these stories were inspired by that snobbish enclave.
One of my favorites was a silly one--she is good at silly stuff. In Maybe it was the Car , she is being taken for granted at home, so takes off on an adventure of her own. “I am a writer, I said to myself in the corner of the kitchen. I am a writer and here I sit broiling hamburgers.” “'Listen,’ I said, ‘am I a writer or am I a middle-aged housewife?’”
Another favorite was What a Thought . You know how sometimes you let your imagination go and picture some disaster, like a train wreck or hitting someone over the head with a shovel? Yeah, well, Shirley knew about this and wrote a great story around it.
I didn’t like the section of once-published stories as much. Publication dates span from 1943 to 1968, in magazines from Good Housekeeping to Playboy. Here, in contrast to the unpublished ones, I felt she was holding back. Some interesting explorations, but no standouts for me.
Recommended for fans, and for a deep dive into Shirley Jackson’s writing style. A fun journey.
The fun part was immersing myself in her style. Just like with The Lottery (though not as good, obviously), I noticed she disarms you with her regularness, and then lays something crazy on you. I’m just like you, but look what I see! I love the title for that reason. It’s just an ordinary day, but Shirley sees something different in it. That’s not to say these are supernatural or spooky stories. Only one or two come close to that. But they do explore humanities odd, quirky side. Many are kind of like her Life Among the Savages, only as if she wrote them not caring who would read them, which made them scandalously fun.
The first story was one of my favorites, The Smoking Room , where you learn you can trick the devil with words.
The best spooky one was Summer Afternoon , about two pre-school aged girls and a ghost.
The Very Hot Sun in Bermuda - man, this one sounded like an exposé of her husband’s flings with his students. Ouch!
And I loved how Shirley, the 1950’s housewife, wrote a number of stories with mysteriously magical helpers that came into the home and took care of meals and children and kept everything together.
Several stories made me think Shirley was more like Eleanor in The Haunting of Hill House than I may have imagined. She grew up very much an outsider in an affluent suburb of San Francisco that I know well, and I suspect the small towns she included in these stories were inspired by that snobbish enclave.
One of my favorites was a silly one--she is good at silly stuff. In Maybe it was the Car , she is being taken for granted at home, so takes off on an adventure of her own. “I am a writer, I said to myself in the corner of the kitchen. I am a writer and here I sit broiling hamburgers.” “'Listen,’ I said, ‘am I a writer or am I a middle-aged housewife?’”
Another favorite was What a Thought . You know how sometimes you let your imagination go and picture some disaster, like a train wreck or hitting someone over the head with a shovel? Yeah, well, Shirley knew about this and wrote a great story around it.
I didn’t like the section of once-published stories as much. Publication dates span from 1943 to 1968, in magazines from Good Housekeeping to Playboy. Here, in contrast to the unpublished ones, I felt she was holding back. Some interesting explorations, but no standouts for me.
Recommended for fans, and for a deep dive into Shirley Jackson’s writing style. A fun journey.
June 11, 2023
Dopo La luna di miele di Mrs. Smith, Adelphi pubblica anche la seconda parte delle storie comprese nella raccolta "Just an ordinary day". Si tratta di ventidue racconti con epilogo, scritti tra gli anni Quaranta e Cinquanta, ritrovati dai figli di Shirley. Alcuni di questi racconti sono inediti, altri sono usciti in alcune riviste durante quegli anni.
Come sempre nelle storie della Jackson, la vita di tutti i giorni e le piccole idiosincrasie delle persone sono i veri protagonisti. Dietro ad atteggiamenti e maschere da persone "perbene" si nascondono, infatti, pensieri ed azioni quasi diabolici. Per esempio nel racconto che dà il titolo alla raccolta, Un giorno come un altro, con noccioline, il protagonista dispensa noccioline e favori, ma quando torna a casa, il lettore comprende che si tratta di un vero e proprio "lavoro", che svolge insieme alla moglie, spesso scambiandosi i ruoli. In La possibilità del male la protagonista scrive lettere anonime al suo vicinato per avvertirli della possibilità che possa succedere qualcosa di malvagio; tuttavia, appena la sua abitudine viene scoperta, gli altri non la prendono molto bene.
In uno dei racconti più belli della raccolta, La strana casa accanto, si ritrovano le stesse atmosfere cupe del romanzo "Abbiamo sempre vissuto nel castello": l'ipocrisia degli abitanti dei piccoli paesi e la paura del diverso spingono a compiere delle azioni orribili pur di liberarsi di una famiglia sgradita.
I racconti La moneta dei desideri e Storia di due brave persone hanno tinte comiche e mostrano anche questo lato della Jackson, che personalmente gradisco molto.
La scrittura di Shirley Jackson è come sempre evocativa, sincera e irriverente. L'introspezione dei personaggi, soprattutto quelli femminili, è uno dei suoi punti di forza: ci si sorprende a voler bene o ad odiare i protagonisti dei suoi racconti, anche se tratteggiati in così poche pagine. Un'unica nota sull'edizione: trovo sia un po' deludente il fatto che siano presenti alcuni racconti già pubblicati in precedenza da Adelphi in altre raccolte, come La ragazza scomparsa e Viaggio con signora. Da una casa editrice così attenta, mi aspetto delle edizioni più curate, peccato.
Come sempre nelle storie della Jackson, la vita di tutti i giorni e le piccole idiosincrasie delle persone sono i veri protagonisti. Dietro ad atteggiamenti e maschere da persone "perbene" si nascondono, infatti, pensieri ed azioni quasi diabolici. Per esempio nel racconto che dà il titolo alla raccolta, Un giorno come un altro, con noccioline, il protagonista dispensa noccioline e favori, ma quando torna a casa, il lettore comprende che si tratta di un vero e proprio "lavoro", che svolge insieme alla moglie, spesso scambiandosi i ruoli. In La possibilità del male la protagonista scrive lettere anonime al suo vicinato per avvertirli della possibilità che possa succedere qualcosa di malvagio; tuttavia, appena la sua abitudine viene scoperta, gli altri non la prendono molto bene.
In uno dei racconti più belli della raccolta, La strana casa accanto, si ritrovano le stesse atmosfere cupe del romanzo "Abbiamo sempre vissuto nel castello": l'ipocrisia degli abitanti dei piccoli paesi e la paura del diverso spingono a compiere delle azioni orribili pur di liberarsi di una famiglia sgradita.
I racconti La moneta dei desideri e Storia di due brave persone hanno tinte comiche e mostrano anche questo lato della Jackson, che personalmente gradisco molto.
La scrittura di Shirley Jackson è come sempre evocativa, sincera e irriverente. L'introspezione dei personaggi, soprattutto quelli femminili, è uno dei suoi punti di forza: ci si sorprende a voler bene o ad odiare i protagonisti dei suoi racconti, anche se tratteggiati in così poche pagine. Un'unica nota sull'edizione: trovo sia un po' deludente il fatto che siano presenti alcuni racconti già pubblicati in precedenza da Adelphi in altre raccolte, come La ragazza scomparsa e Viaggio con signora. Da una casa editrice così attenta, mi aspetto delle edizioni più curate, peccato.
January 3, 2018
Bizarre, compelling, fascinating, eerie, melodic, gentle, angry and lyrical.
February 23, 2008
Shirley Jackson in many ways has frequently been made a victim of her own brilliance and success. Nowhere is this more perfectly framed than in this gigantic tome of previous uncollected short stories, many of which are also previously unpublished . She had the ability to craft perfect gems... I mean, it has to be hard to sit down at the keyboard with charismatic and terrifying works such as The Lottery looming over you and say, "...and what now?" Shirley Jackson was a paradox in many ways. On the one hand, she was a chain-smoking, housecoat wearing, boiled coffee-drinking, mid-Twentieth Century housewife and mother; on the other, a writer who possessed uncanny insight into the nature and character of We who muddle through this modern society we've created as if we truly know what we're up to - an insight, to my mind very similar to Hitchcock's. If anything, this collection is a perfect snapshot of a great 20th Century author at work - literally. Many of these stories, in particular the light romantic offerings or the humorous accounts of family life were written with business-like precision for various popular mid-century magazines and might surprise the reader familiar only with Ms. Jackson's more macabre oeuvre. Here are snarky little tales like The Smoking Room, a humorous twist on selling one's soul to the Dark One - written while she was in college, alongside offerings such as the deceptive and darkly ironic One Ordinary Day, with Peanuts, which offers a most unique take on our notions of Good and Evil, written at the height of her powers. Lovingly curated by her family and Estate, this collection is a feast for fans - clocking in at 50 + tales - and also a perfect way for those unfamiliar with her work to sample all the shadows that made Shirley Jackson the genius she was. Dive in and enjoy.
July 23, 2023
"The idea of smashing the glass ashtray over her husband's head had never before occurred to Margaret, but now it would not leave her mind."
Every time I read Jackson, my first incoherent reaction is , "Yass Queennn". Well I will try to go beyond that.
This is the most diverse set of Shirley Jackson's writings I have read. Most of these were found in an attic in Vermont (if I remember correctly) and made into a collection decades after her death. Included here are all the way from trademark Shirley i.e. domestic horror to creepy absurdist comedies to pure comedies to quaint little vignettes about her own family. I loved every one of them. The beauty of Jackson's writing lies in those unexpected nuances of everyday life that one doesn't necessarily think about. It maybe a nuance that is absolutely horrifying to absolutely hilarious. She forces us to question the most ordinary things - one may almost end up feeling paranoid about things, people, choices that one used to trust. That little girl peeking out from behind a curtain. That innocent looking ashtray on the side table or that knife on the kitchen table. A harmless old woman with her old garden. The newly married lady with her very 'normal' husband. And underlying all her stories are often a socio-political aspect, so very subtle, but also somehow strongly felt.
I would not recommend this to Jackson newcomers. I feel this book will particularly appeal to those who have read a lot of her writing already.
Every time I read Jackson, my first incoherent reaction is , "Yass Queennn". Well I will try to go beyond that.
This is the most diverse set of Shirley Jackson's writings I have read. Most of these were found in an attic in Vermont (if I remember correctly) and made into a collection decades after her death. Included here are all the way from trademark Shirley i.e. domestic horror to creepy absurdist comedies to pure comedies to quaint little vignettes about her own family. I loved every one of them. The beauty of Jackson's writing lies in those unexpected nuances of everyday life that one doesn't necessarily think about. It maybe a nuance that is absolutely horrifying to absolutely hilarious. She forces us to question the most ordinary things - one may almost end up feeling paranoid about things, people, choices that one used to trust. That little girl peeking out from behind a curtain. That innocent looking ashtray on the side table or that knife on the kitchen table. A harmless old woman with her old garden. The newly married lady with her very 'normal' husband. And underlying all her stories are often a socio-political aspect, so very subtle, but also somehow strongly felt.
I would not recommend this to Jackson newcomers. I feel this book will particularly appeal to those who have read a lot of her writing already.
May 23, 2016
What a great collection! It contains more than 50 stories which are divided in two parts - the first part consists of previously unpublished stories, most of them are really short, just 2-5 pages. This part was a bit of a mixed bag, some stories were really good, some not so much. But the second part, which consists of previously uncollected stories that have been published in magazines like The New Yorker, Ladies' Home Journal, Playboy and Fantasy and Science Fiction, was absolutely brilliant!
If you haven't read anthing by Jackson before, it would be better to start with The Lottery and Other Stories or one of her novels. But if you're already a fan, I'm sure you'll love this collection!
If you haven't read anthing by Jackson before, it would be better to start with The Lottery and Other Stories or one of her novels. But if you're already a fan, I'm sure you'll love this collection!
June 14, 2018
Is there anything better than short stories by Shirley Jackson? Don't answer you fool! That was totally a trick question. There is clearly nothing better. This book is half unpublished stories found in an old trunk years after she died and half previously uncollected short stories from various other publications.
I am constantly amazed at the way Ms. Jackson could make the banal terrifying and domestic life frightening. I'm a huge Stephen King fan and I definitely see her shadow looming large over all that he does. (Well, the good stuff anyway)
I cannot recommend this collection highly enough. I thought I had read all of her work and to discover these new stories was truly a gift.
I am constantly amazed at the way Ms. Jackson could make the banal terrifying and domestic life frightening. I'm a huge Stephen King fan and I definitely see her shadow looming large over all that he does. (Well, the good stuff anyway)
I cannot recommend this collection highly enough. I thought I had read all of her work and to discover these new stories was truly a gift.
October 26, 2015
I've really fallen for Shirley Jackson's short stories. It fascinates me how they're set in such a specific ’40/50s era, often either among young women in a city setting that's newly friendly to women on their own, or among small-town folks in a particular kind of idealized 1950s setting marked by funny provincialism and a deeply nasty streak of malice and gossip. This collection has both types, and mixes published and unpublished work, and it's a real gem. An absolute favorite is "Dinner For A Gentleman," which has a clumsy young woman who can't cook backing herself into a corner to impress a food snob, and a sort of magical grandmother figure saving the day. And "Nightmare" is a particularly surreal story that does feel like a nightmare, with a bizarre out-there ending. "The Very Strange House Next Door" feels like a Neil Gaiman short story — not the first time I've thought that about Jackson's writing—and "All She Said Was Yes" is a very subtle horror story to rival "The Lottery." I love how Jackson draws characters, especially children, with their weird brand of intense sincerity and simplicity, and judgmental older folks with their "Everyone should know what I know, but I wouldn't be rude by telling them" attitudes. She's a master of simple characterization, entirely in terms of dialogue and a few bare descriptors. I'd recommend this book just for entertainment reading, but it could also double as a writing class, in how to cut to the heart of a story quickly, and establish who characters are efficiently and thoroughly, without wasted detail.
June 10, 2008
I love Shirley Jackson's stories and novels--she's one of my absolute favorite writers, and normally when I feel that way about a writer, I'd like the opportunity to have more books of their writing published, even posthumously, as this collections of stories was brought out long after her death. Unfortunately, this is all of Jackson's juvenile work, from when she was learning how to write stories. Many of them are quite badly done, overly sentimental, structurally awkward, conceptually unrealized, and many suffer from an abundance of youthful cliche. I was actually upset that such a book was produced for mass market consumption, seeing how it would be more in the interest of Jackson scholars, rather than general readership. However, many people here at Goodreads appear to have liked this collection quite a bit, so my response to this book may be particularly singular. Like I said, I love Jackson's work, but these aren't illustrative of her best work--the creepy stuff, which it seems many people who liked these stories (many of which feel only half-finished) dislike. I'd take it out of the library before making a purchase on sheer love of the author alone, in this case.
October 18, 2025
Obviously Shirley Jackson was a Master of Psychological Horror. Her great The Haunting of Hill House doesn’t even have an actual ghost. It’s all in the mind.
The story “Nightmare “ is exactly that. A secretary named Toni Morgan is endlessly delivering an unwieldy box while being followed by a truck with speakers blaring Find Miss X then describing Toni in detail and describing an always changing assortment of fantastical prizes.
The story “Nightmare “ is exactly that. A secretary named Toni Morgan is endlessly delivering an unwieldy box while being followed by a truck with speakers blaring Find Miss X then describing Toni in detail and describing an always changing assortment of fantastical prizes.
October 24, 2020
This is the year we all rediscover Shirley Jackson, right? Largely because of a largely inaccurate biopic that we all watched in quarantine. I loved Jackson since I was a teenager, but I never read much beyond a few novels. (I really want to read Hangsaman.) The bad news is that many of these are throwaway pieces Jackson published in magazines, often cutesy things that would have fit the time period. The good news is there are some sharp pieces in here too, like "The Missing Girl," which again (like Hangsaman ) is about the founding disappearance case in the so-called Bennington Triangle mystery. That is a perplexing series of disappearances. One wonders if a serial killer "got away with it." But then when forests are involved, all bets are off.
What I like best about Jackson's short fiction is that she focuses on the terrifyingly irrational impulse in otherwise rational people. She doesn't need a ghost to create terror. She just needs a bad decision that comes out of nowhere. That's a really good authorial strategy. Bravissima, Shirley!
What I like best about Jackson's short fiction is that she focuses on the terrifyingly irrational impulse in otherwise rational people. She doesn't need a ghost to create terror. She just needs a bad decision that comes out of nowhere. That's a really good authorial strategy. Bravissima, Shirley!
July 31, 2023
Che bella questa raccolta di racconti!
September 1, 2023
Il mio solito problema con le raccolte di racconti stava per intaccare anche questa lettura MA
ma Shirley Jackson é Shirley Jackson e io giuro che se mi chiedessero con quale famosə defuntə vorrei prendere un caffè sarebbe sicuramente lei perché potremmo finalmente passare il tempo a sparlare di tutti, guardare foto di gattini e ridere coi meme
Che intelligenza acuta, che umorismo nero e che anima abissale
ma Shirley Jackson é Shirley Jackson e io giuro che se mi chiedessero con quale famosə defuntə vorrei prendere un caffè sarebbe sicuramente lei perché potremmo finalmente passare il tempo a sparlare di tutti, guardare foto di gattini e ridere coi meme
Che intelligenza acuta, che umorismo nero e che anima abissale
August 3, 2025
Miss Strangeworth non si preoccupava mai dei fatti; tutte le sue lettere riguardavano qualcosa di più opinabile, come il sospetto.
February 4, 2023
Shirley Jackson è sempre una conferma ❤️ raccolta di racconti molto bella e che scivola come l'olio, ne inizi uno e continui subito con quello dopo. Non c'è molta ansia o inquietudine come negli altri suoi romanzi anche se si ritrovano delle tematiche come quella del gruppo di cittadini contro abitanti di una casa che trovano diversi ("Abbiamo sempre vissuto nel castello"). Le protagoniste principali sono le casalinghe e la Jackson esplora questa figura con storie semplici in alcuni casi oppure con un pizzico di magia ✨ alcune hanno il suo solito colpo di scena dell'ultima frase che adoro tantissimo!
November 15, 2024
Tranquille cittadine, linde e ordinate, abitate da tranquilli e civili abitanti...o almeno sembra! La penna di Shirley Jackson improvvisamente ci svela con ironia caustica ciò che si nasconde nel torbido e meschino animo umano. In questa raccolta l'autrice è più "buona " del solito perché ci sono anche racconti più positivi senza risvolto dark. In ogni caso adorabile 🖤
February 24, 2023
Cosa si può chiedere alla regina del gotico americano?
Se ne può chiedere ancora, e ancora. Anche i racconti meno ficcanti, anche quelli che alla fine non lasciano nulla sono di una pulizia totale.
Poi ci sono quelli che colpiscono nel segno e non lo fanno mai con clamore ma con un soffio che fa venire la pelle d’oca.
Viva la regina.
Se ne può chiedere ancora, e ancora. Anche i racconti meno ficcanti, anche quelli che alla fine non lasciano nulla sono di una pulizia totale.
Poi ci sono quelli che colpiscono nel segno e non lo fanno mai con clamore ma con un soffio che fa venire la pelle d’oca.
Viva la regina.
November 8, 2023
migliori:
magia di famiglia
la moneta dei desideri
viaggio con sigliora
la possibilità del male
magia di famiglia
la moneta dei desideri
viaggio con sigliora
la possibilità del male
July 17, 2011
Unlike The Lottery where the stories collected followed a distinct theme, Just an Ordinary Day has little to unite the tales within. The collection is made up half of unpublished stories, and half of uncollected stories, thus becoming a best of the obscure of Shirley Jackson. Do not balk at the fact that stories have scarcely seen the light of day - the fact they hadn't been collected until recently is in some ways a travesty.
The stories consist of a whole slew of genres. There are the classic family stories, including one hilarious one about how to deal with unruly Cub Scouts - there are supernatural stories, horror stories, and simply unsettling stories of day to day life. One of the interesting facets of the book is the fact that the same themes and characters pop up time and time again. I am also rather pleased to say that at one point two versions of the same story were put side by side, thus allowing a look into how Shirley Jackson revised her stories and perfected them over time.
I highly recommend this book to anyone who enjoys Shirley Jackson's writing, or indeed, anyone who writes and treasures short stories. This is a very interesting look into the writing of one who is a truly shining example of that medium.
The stories consist of a whole slew of genres. There are the classic family stories, including one hilarious one about how to deal with unruly Cub Scouts - there are supernatural stories, horror stories, and simply unsettling stories of day to day life. One of the interesting facets of the book is the fact that the same themes and characters pop up time and time again. I am also rather pleased to say that at one point two versions of the same story were put side by side, thus allowing a look into how Shirley Jackson revised her stories and perfected them over time.
I highly recommend this book to anyone who enjoys Shirley Jackson's writing, or indeed, anyone who writes and treasures short stories. This is a very interesting look into the writing of one who is a truly shining example of that medium.
July 31, 2012
Shirley Jackson is one of my favorite writers. While these stories may not be her absolute best, I adore the restraint with which she writes and the undeniable feeling of dread one gets when reading her stories. I read her short story that was turned into the movie "The Birds" and have to say that, for me, the story was far creepier than the movie as it was told with remarkable quietness and, yes, restraint. Of course, don't miss "The Lottery"!
November 24, 2017
This is not the most eloquent of reviews & I apologise for that, I just wanted to say that ‘Just an Ordinary Day’ is an amazing collection of unpublished & uncollected stories by Shirley Jackson.
Shirley Jackson had a talent of showing the underbelly of life, how people interact with each other & their insights on life in general, with this collection of stories you meet various characters, there was humour with a dark edge. I enjoyed all the stories, my particular favourite being ‘The Possibility of Evil’, it’s not a long story, it does have a very satisfying ending, call me cynical, call me cruel, there’s just something about just desserts for people who deserve it, that makes me smile.
I have said many times before & no doubt will say many times again, I have always found Shirley Jackson to be fierce writer, she had the talent to unnerve you & make you laugh at the same time.
If you get the chance to read ‘Just an Ordinary Day’ - enjoy! If you feel like reading one of Shirley Jackson’s novels, try ‘We Have Always Lived in the Castle’, Merricat Blackwood will definitely grab your attention.
Shirley Jackson had a talent of showing the underbelly of life, how people interact with each other & their insights on life in general, with this collection of stories you meet various characters, there was humour with a dark edge. I enjoyed all the stories, my particular favourite being ‘The Possibility of Evil’, it’s not a long story, it does have a very satisfying ending, call me cynical, call me cruel, there’s just something about just desserts for people who deserve it, that makes me smile.
I have said many times before & no doubt will say many times again, I have always found Shirley Jackson to be fierce writer, she had the talent to unnerve you & make you laugh at the same time.
If you get the chance to read ‘Just an Ordinary Day’ - enjoy! If you feel like reading one of Shirley Jackson’s novels, try ‘We Have Always Lived in the Castle’, Merricat Blackwood will definitely grab your attention.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
January 2, 2025
What did Shirley Jackson have against vegetable soups?
Anyway, the stories I enjoyed the most in no particular order:
Come to the fair
Mrs Anderson
The honeymoon of Mrs Smith (2nd version)
Maybe it was the car
My recollections of S. B. Fairchild
What a Thought
Mrs. Melville makes a purchase
The Friends
The very strange house next door
A great voice stilled
Home
The possibility of evil
Favorite quote from the story What a Thought:
“She flipped the pages of her book idly; it was not interesting. She knew that if she asked her husband to take her to a movie, or out on a ride, or to play gin rummy, he would smile at her and agree, he was always willing to do things to please her, still, after ten years of marriage. An odd thought crossed her mind: She would pick up the heavy glass ashtray and smash her husband over the head with it.”
Anyway, the stories I enjoyed the most in no particular order:
Come to the fair
Mrs Anderson
The honeymoon of Mrs Smith (2nd version)
Maybe it was the car
My recollections of S. B. Fairchild
What a Thought
Mrs. Melville makes a purchase
The Friends
The very strange house next door
A great voice stilled
Home
The possibility of evil
Favorite quote from the story What a Thought:
“She flipped the pages of her book idly; it was not interesting. She knew that if she asked her husband to take her to a movie, or out on a ride, or to play gin rummy, he would smile at her and agree, he was always willing to do things to please her, still, after ten years of marriage. An odd thought crossed her mind: She would pick up the heavy glass ashtray and smash her husband over the head with it.”
March 27, 2025
Some very strange and intriguing stories amongst some that didn't do anything for me; that's a collection of previously unpublished works for you. A lot of these were much more sentimental and sweet than you'd associate with Shirley Jackson. It was interesting to see her flex her writing muscles in different ways, even if it sometimes made for less engrossing reading. I am a huge Shirley Jackson fan, so for me it was 4 stars. Lesser Shirley is better than no Shirley at all. If you're not a super fan, this is 3 stars and possibly a skip. My favorite story that I'd never read before was "Come to the Fair". This collection also had an alternate version of Jackson's fantastic story "The Honeymoon of Mrs. Smith", written with a completely different perspective. The book contains both versions, with the second version being the one that makes the more interesting character choice. I'd read that version before, and it was very interesting to read both and see her process in taking an idea to the next level.
January 14, 2019
I hate to admit but the twist for most of the stories was lost on me. Yeah, go ahead, call me a dimwit.
But I still liked a few that were written so beautifully that I am thinking about them even though I've long finished reading them. These, I would definitely read again.
Namely,
1. Devil of a Tale
2. The Missing Girl
3. Family Magician
4. The Wishing Dime
5. Nightmare
But I still liked a few that were written so beautifully that I am thinking about them even though I've long finished reading them. These, I would definitely read again.
Namely,
1. Devil of a Tale
2. The Missing Girl
3. Family Magician
4. The Wishing Dime
5. Nightmare
May 19, 2025
this woman can do (write) no wrong in my eyes
Wonderfully witty, and darkly deceptive, “Just an Ordinary Day” is the perfect ‘pick me up’, if you’re in a reading lull -guaranteed bangers !
4.5 stars (only knocking half a star off, as some stories were 3 star worthy -so gotta average it out ya know!)
Wonderfully witty, and darkly deceptive, “Just an Ordinary Day” is the perfect ‘pick me up’, if you’re in a reading lull -guaranteed bangers !
4.5 stars (only knocking half a star off, as some stories were 3 star worthy -so gotta average it out ya know!)
August 20, 2019
Finally finished! Quality is high, of course, because it's Shirls, but I can't help thinking she would never have put some of these into a collection. Some of the more domestic ones just seemed like money makers; the darker ones had all the heart.
June 28, 2022
Such a delightful book of short stories; especially great summer read. I expected more of the stories to be spookier, but instead many were very “real” depictions of places and scenarios. My favorites stories were those including Malley, the mysterious, magical maid. Great read.
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