‘Charles’ is a short story by the American writer Shirley Jackson (1916-65), first published in the women’s magazine Mademoiselle in 1948 and included in her 1949 collection, The Lottery and Other Stories. The story is about a young boy who, upon starting kindergarten, picks up bad habits which he attributes to […]
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘The Lottery’ is a famous 1948 short story of the American writer Shirley Jackson. The story focuses on a village where an annual lottery is drawn, with the fate of the person who draws the ‘winning’ slip only revealed at the end of the […]
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘The Lottery’ by the American writer Shirley Jackson (1916-65) was first published on 26 June 1948 in the New Yorker magazine. The story was initially met with anger and even a fair amount of hate mail from readers, with many cancelling their subscriptions to […]
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) What are the most important quotations in Shirley Jackson’s well-known 1948 short story ‘The Lottery’? This deeply unsettling story about a village which annually selects a blood sacrifice from its inhabitants in the hope of bringing about a good harvest is widely studied and […]
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘The Witch’ is a short story by the American writer Shirley Jackson. The plot is very straightforward and the story runs to only a few pages, telling of how a mother travels on the train with her young son and baby daughter, and how […]