<b>From the renowned author of “The Lottery” and <i>The Haunting of Hill House,</i>a spectacular new volume of previously unpublished and uncollected stories, essays, lectures, and letters.</b><br><b></b><br>Shirley Jackson is considered one of the most important American writers of the last hundred years and among our nation’s greatest female authors. Since her death in 1965, her place in the landscape of twentieth-century fiction has grown only more exalted.<br><br>Just as we approach the centenary of her birth comes this astonishing compilation of fifty-six pieces—more than forty of which have never been published before—including thirty short stories, sixteen essays and reviews, and ten humorous portraits of Jackson’s family. Two of Jackson’s children have co-edited this volume over several years, culling through the vast archives of their mother’s papers at the Library of Congress. They then painstakingly assembled the writings, selecting only the very best for inclusion here.<br><br><i>Let Me Tell You </i>brings together the sort of deliciously eerie short stories Jackson is best known for and frank, inspiring lectures on writing; comic essays she wrote for women’s magazines about her large, boisterous family, including mirthful, insightful portraits of her children; revelatory personal letters; and whimsical drawings that show Jackson as an irrepressible artist—always envisioning, always creating. Jackson’s landscape here is most frequently domestic: dinner parties and bridge, household budgets and homeward-bound commutes, children’s games and neighborly gossip. But this familiar setting is also her most subversive: She wields humor, terror, verisimilitude, and the uncanny to explore the real challenges of marriage, parenting, and community—the pressure of social norms, the veins of distrust in love, the strong hold of egos, the constant lack of time and space.<br><br>This collection is the first opportunity to see Shirley Jackson’s radically different modes of writing side by side. Together they show her to be a magnificent storyteller, a sharp, sly humorist with a voice all her own, a piercing prose stylist, and a powerful feminist who could—and can—cause tremors of thinking from her position as a writer, mother, wife, and homemaker.<br><br>This volume includes an Introduction by the celebrated literary critic and Jackson biographer Ruth Franklin.<br><br><b>Advance praise for <i>Let Me Tell You</i></b><br><i></i><br>“Jackson, an inspiration to writers from Stephen King to Joyce Carol Oates, dared to look on the dark side and imagine the unimaginable, as demonstrated in this volume of her uncollected and unpublished work. . . . A multifaceted portrait of the artist as wife, mother, commentator on the comfortable middle class, and pioneer who explored the world of inexplicable, occasionally frightening phenomena.”<b>—<i>Publishers Weekly</i></b><br><br>“Remember the chilling excitement of reading Jackson’s ‘The Lottery’ for the first time? You’ll have that same experience over and over again with this new collection.”<b>—<i>Library Journal<br></i></b><br><b>Praise for Shirley Jackson</b><br><br>“Shirley Jackson’s stories are among the most terrifying ever written.”<b>—Donna Tartt</b><br><br>“Jackson is unparalleled as a leader in the field of beautifully written, quiet, cumulative shudders.”<b>—Dorothy Parker,<i>Esquire</i></b><br><br>“[Jackson plumbs] the extraordinary from the depths of mid-twentieth-century common.”<b>—<i>San Francisco Chronicle</i></b><br><br>“In her art, as in her life, Shirley Jackson was an absolute original.”<b>—<i>Newsweek</i></b>