“Jackson at her best: plumbing the extraordinary from the depths of mid-twentieth-century common. [Just an Ordinary Day] is a gift to a new generation.”—San Francisco Chronicle Acclaimed in her own time for her short story “The Lottery” and her novel The Haunting of Hill House—classics ranking with the work of Edgar Allan Poe—Shirley Jackson blazed a path for contemporary writers with her explorations of evil, madness, and cruelty. Soon after her untimely death in 1965, Jackson’s children discovered a treasure trove of previously unpublished and uncollected stories, many of which are brought together in this remarkable collection. Here are tales of torment, psychological aberration, and the macabre, as well as those that display her lighter touch with humorous scenes of domestic life. Reflecting the range and complexity of Jackson’s talent, Just an Ordinary Day reaffirms her enduring influence and celebrates her singular voice, rich with magic and resonance. Praise for Shirley Jackson “[Jackson’s] work exerts an enduring spell.”—Joyce Carol Oates “Shirley Jackson’s stories are among the most terrifying ever written.”—Donna Tartt “An amazing writer . . . If you haven’t read [Jackson] you have missed out on something marvelous.”—Neil Gaiman “Shirley Jackson is unparalleled as a leader in the field of beautifully written, quiet, cumulative shudders.”—Dorothy Parker “An author who not only writes beautifully but who knows what there is, in this world, to be scared of.”—Francine Prose “The world of Shirley Jackson is eerie and unforgettable.”—A. M. Homes “Jackson enjoyed notoriety and commercial success within her lifetime, and yet it still hardly seems like enough for a writer so singular. When I meet readers and other writers of my generation, I find that mentioning her is like uttering a holy name.”—Victor LaValle

Permeated with the loneliness of exile, these sensual lyric poems straddle the gap between Chinese and American sensibilities, politics, and culture. The poems contain both autobiography and a kind of universal biography—they weep, and sing, for us all.

Shirley Jackson was one of America's most prominent female writers of the 1950s. Between 1948 and 1965 she published six novels, one best-selling story collection, two popular volumes of her family chronicles and many stories, which ranged from fairly conventional tales for the women's magazine market to the ambiguous, allusive, delicately sinister and more obviously literary stories that were closest to Jackson's heart and destined to end up in the more highbrow end of the market. Most critical discussions of Jackson tend to focus on "The Lottery" and The Haunting of Hill House. An author of such accomplishment--and one so fully engaged with the pressures and preoccupations of postwar America--merits fuller discussion. To that end, this collection of essays widens the scope of Jackson scholarship with new writing on such works as The Road through the Wall and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and topics ranging from Jackson's domestic fiction to ethics, cosmology, and eschatology. The book also makes newly available some of the most significant Jackson scholarship published in the last two decades.

Imagine raising six spirited kids on a grass farm. Today. That'll test any mama's strength. Dorcas Smucker and her brood live out their days in full view in this collection of musings—picking blueberries while watching for bears, hoping for angels driving off the nearby freeway, moving into the "thousand-story house." Then there was the four-week road trip, which, Dorcas says, "My sister-in-law warned me would be like putting your whole family in the bathroom and staying there for three days." There are no recipes here. But there is story upon story. Dorcas has three daughters and three sons. And she has a voice—encouraging, doubting, entertaining, but never taking herself too seriously. Often slightly off-stride, and with disarming humility, Dorcas keeps finding resource in her life at home.

From Eudora Welty's memoir of childhood to May Sarton's reflections on her seventieth year, writers' journals offer an irresistible opportunity to join a creative thinker in musing on the events—whether in daily life or on a global scale—that shape our lives. In An Extraordinary Year of Ordinary Days, best-selling mystery novelist Susan Wittig Albert invites us to revisit one of the most tumultuous years in recent memory, 2008, through the lens of 365 ordinary days in which her reading, writing, and thinking about issues in the wider world—from wars and economic recession to climate change—caused her to reconsider and reshape daily practices in her personal life. Albert's journal provides an engaging account of how the business of being a successful working writer blends with her rural life in the Texas Hill Country and the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of New Mexico. As her eclectic daily reading ranges across topics from economics, food production, and oil and energy policy to poetry, place, and the writing life, Albert becomes increasingly concerned about the natural world and the threats facing it, especially climate change and resource depletion. Asking herself, "What does it mean? And what ought I do about it?", she determines practical steps to take, such as growing more food in her garden, and also helps us as readers make sense of these issues and consider what our own responses might be.

Stylistic study of Virgina Woolf's fiction. Reading a novel by Virginia Woolf involves an element of `double reflexiveness': first, the reader's interaction with Woolf's words and what they describe, and second, the interaction of these words with the world Woolf perceivedand attempted to represent. Oddvar Holmesland takes this paradox and shows that it is not the invention of recent critics but something of which Woolf herself is well aware. In a number of analyses of Woolf's major works - MrsDalloway, To the Lighthouse, The Waves - he explores the ambiguity that Woolf's reader must work through in order to reach the insights and rewards that her fiction offers. Professor ODDVAR HOLMESLAND is Professor of English at the University of Tromso, Norway.