The late Shirley Jackson (1919-65) is the author of the classic short story, "The Lottery," a dark, unforgettable tale of the unthinking and murderous customs of a small New England town. She is also the author of several American Gothic novels, such as We Have Always Lived in the Castle and The Haunting of Hill House. Her atmospheric stories explore themes of psychological turmoil, isolation, and the inequity of fate. Just an Ordinary Day is a posthumous collection of 54 short stories (many of which have never been published), edited and introduced by two of Jackson's children. Jackson penned many of the stories in this volume for the popular press, for titles ranging from Fantasy and Science Fiction and The New Yorker to women's magazines such as Charm and Good Housekeeping. The disparity of the intended audience and the divergent styles result in an uneven collection of short stories, some that are outstanding and will be much appreciated by the reading public, others that hold interest only to the die-hard fan or chronicler of Jackson's work.


From Publishers Weekly
From the hilarious first story in this treat of a collection, in which a college girl tricks the devil (horns, hoofs and all) into selling her his soul, we know we are in Jackson territory-the Jackson of the classic short story "The Lottery" and the novel The Haunting of Hill House. For Jackson devotees, as well as first-time readers, this is a feast: more than half of the 54 short stories collected here have never been published before. The circumstances that inspired the volume are appropriately bizarre. According to Jackson's children, "a carton of cobwebbed files discovered in a Vermont barn" arrived in the mail one day without notice; along with the original manuscript of her novel, the box contained six unpublished stories. Other pieces, culled from family collections, and from archives and papers at the San Francisco Public Library and the Library of Congress, appeared in print only once, in various magazines. The stories are diverse: there are tales that pillory smug, self-satisfied, small-town ladies; chilling and murderous chronicles of marriage; witty romantic comedies; and tales that reveal an eerie juxtaposition of good and evil. The devil, who can't seem to get an even break, makes several appearances. Each of Jackson's ghost stories-often centered around a child, missing or dead-is beautifully anchored in and thoroughly shaped by a particular point of view. A few pieces that qualify as humorous takes on the predicaments of modern life add a relaxed, biographical element to a virtuoso collection. (Dec.) FYI: Jackson, who died in 1965 at age 48, is poised for a literary revival: the BBC is releasing a biography in the fall, and a new film version of The Haunting of Hill House is currently in production.Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
This collection by Jackson (1919-1965), known to friends as the "Virginia Werewolf of Seance Fiction" for works like The Haunting of Hill House (1959), includes unpublished and uncollected pieces.Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.


Entertainment Weekly
Lighthearted family tales and more typically macabre fare, culled from a carton of unpublished manuscripts found in a barn 30 years after the author's death.


The New York Times Book Review, Joyce Carol Oates
Is there a moral as well as a professional responsibility involved in bringing together disparate work by a writer no longer living, . . .for bringing into print inferior material the writer might have opposed publishing? . . .the melancholy fact is that only six or seven of the stories in the collection merit publication. . . .to be properly appreciated, the few outstanding stories . . . need to be separated from the dross that surrounds them.


From Booklist
The late author of "The Lottery," a short story found in nearly every anthology and never to be forgotten once read, left behind several published novels and story collections. She also left many unpublished story manuscripts as well as several stories that were published in magazines but never gathered in book form; now her children have selected 54 of these stories for inclusion in this posthumous collection, all of which they believe are "up to Shirley Jackson's finely tuned standards." Artistic development is obvious as we read through her career's worth of writing, from her salad days in college (when she was already demonstrating considerable talent) to the flowering of her mastery of the short story form in the 1960s, the last decade of her life. Not all of them are dark in the fashion of "The Lottery" ; some are light and funny. One of the most delightful is one of the unpublished pieces, "Maybe It Was the Car," about a woman--writer, wife, and mother--who one day walks out on frying the supper hamburgers in a moment of self-assertion. An important addition to fiction collections. Brad Hooper


From Kirkus Reviews
A patchwork collection of 54 (mostly brief) stories, all previously uncollected and/or unpublished, by the late (191965) author of The Lottery, The Haunting of Hill House, and other classics of contemporary supernatural fiction. Jackson's talent was to find the ghoulish and disturbing just beneath the surface of the commonplace (her work has significantly influenced Stephen King's). Accordingly, a majority of these stories portray marital or domestic crises, cunningly raised to high levels of tension and, very often, terror. Though Lucifer himself shows up in a few (most memorably, ``The Smoking Room,'' where he's outwitted by a calculating coed), Jackson's evil figures are, much more often, enigmatic men who prey on or otherwise disappoint the women who adore them (``The Honeymoon of Mrs. Smith''), children who intuit odd occurrences and presences their elders cannot perceive (``Summer Afternoon''), and nice old ladies whose charming eccentricities mask their darker purposes (``The Possibility of Evil''). There's rather a lot of inchoate work here (such as a weak piece of romantic medievalism, ``Lord of the Castle''), and many of the bland titles were obviously only preliminary. Of the unpublished stories, best are such Saki-like models of compact menace as ``The Mouse,'' ``What a Thought,'' and ``Mrs. Anderson''--as well as two of Jackson's most amusing pictures of embattled motherhood (``Arch-Criminal'' and ``Alone in a Den of Cubs''). The uncollected pieces, many of them first published in popular magazines, are nevertheless generally much stronger. They feature several ingenious premises (``The Wishing Dime,'' ``Journey with a Lady,'' and especially ``The Omen,'' a complex chiller beautifully developed from its fairy-tale-like beginning), vividly realistic characterizations (``Mrs. Melville Makes a Purchase''), and at least one indisputable classic: ``One Ordinary Day, with Peanuts,'' in which Jackson records with virtuosic understatement the cruel and unusual avocation shared by a devoted suburban couple. Even at a bit below the level of her best work, it's nice to have Jackson back again. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Book Description
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 Inside Flap
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 PUBLISHER

Just an Ordinary Day began with the discovery of a cobweb-covered carton of files in a Vermont barn. In that box were lost, unpublished stories by the late Shirley Jackson, whose short story "The Lottery" has become a classic and whose novel The Haunting of Hill House has joined the works of Edgar Allan Poe as a perfect blend of art and terror. Edited by two of Shirley Jackson's children, these lost tales, along with other stories, form the first major collection of Jackson's work in thirty years. The fifty-four stories in this edition represent the great diversity of her work, from humor to shocking explorations of the human psyche.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

From the hilarious first story in this treat of a collection, in which a college girl tricks the devil (horns, hoofs and all) into selling her his soul, we know we are in Jackson territory-the Jackson of the classic short story "The Lottery'' and the novel The Haunting of Hill House. For Jackson devotees, as well as first-time readers, this is a feast: more than half of the 54 short stories collected here have never been published before. The circumstances that inspired the volume are appropriately bizarre. According to Jackson's children, "a carton of cobwebbed files discovered in a Vermont barn" arrived in the mail one day without notice; along with the original manuscript of her novel, the box contained six unpublished stories. Other pieces, culled from family collections, and from archives and papers at the San Francisco Public Library and the Library of Congress, appeared in print only once, in various magazines. The stories are diverse: there are tales that pillory smug, self-satisfied, small-town ladies; chilling and murderous chronicles of marriage; witty romantic comedies; and tales that reveal an eerie juxtaposition of good and evil. The devil, who can't seem to get an even break, makes several appearances. Each of Jackson's ghost stories-often centered around a child, missing or dead-is beautifully anchored in and thoroughly shaped by a particular point of view. A few pieces that qualify as humorous takes on the predicaments of modern life add a relaxed, biographical element to a virtuoso collection. (Dec.) FYI: Jackson, who died in 1965 at age 48, is poised for a literary revival: the BBC is releasing a biography in the fall, and a new film version of The Haunting of Hill House is currently in production.

Library Journal

This collection by Jackson (1919-1965), known to friends as the "Virginia Werewolf of Seance Fiction" for works like The Haunting of Hill House (1959), includes unpublished and uncollected pieces.

Kirkus Reviews

A patchwork collection of 54 (mostly brief) stories, all previously uncollected and/or unpublished, by the late (191965) author of The Lottery, The Haunting of Hill House, and other classics of contemporary supernatural fiction.

Jackson's talent was to find the ghoulish and disturbing just beneath the surface of the commonplace (her work has significantly influenced Stephen King's). Accordingly, a majority of these stories portray marital or domestic crises, cunningly raised to high levels of tension and, very often, terror. Though Lucifer himself shows up in a few (most memorably, "The Smoking Room," where he's outwitted by a calculating coed), Jackson's evil figures are, much more often, enigmatic men who prey on or otherwise disappoint the women who adore them ("The Honeymoon of Mrs. Smith"), children who intuit odd occurrences and presences their elders cannot perceive ("Summer Afternoon"), and nice old ladies whose charming eccentricities mask their darker purposes ("The Possibility of Evil"). There's rather a lot of inchoate work here (such as a weak piece of romantic medievalism, "Lord of the Castle"), and many of the bland titles were obviously only preliminary. Of the unpublished stories, best are such Saki-like models of compact menace as "The Mouse," "What a Thought," and "Mrs. Anderson"—as well as two of Jackson's most amusing pictures of embattled motherhood ("Arch-Criminal" and "Alone in a Den of Cubs"). The uncollected pieces, many of them first published in popular magazines, are nevertheless generally much stronger. They feature several ingenious premises ("The Wishing Dime," "Journey with a Lady," and especially "The Omen," a complex chiller beautifully developed from its fairy-tale-like beginning), vividly realistic characterizations ("Mrs. Melville Makes a Purchase"), and at least one indisputable classic: "One Ordinary Day, with Peanuts," in which Jackson records with virtuosic understatement the cruel and unusual avocation shared by a devoted suburban couple.

Even at a bit below the level of her best work, it's nice to have Jackson back again.