She is best known for her dystopian short story, 'The Lottery' (1948), which suggests there is a deeply unsettling underside to bucolic, smalltown America. She has influenced such writers as Stephen King, Nigel Kneale, and Richard Matheson. A popular writer in her time, her work has received increasing attention from literary critics in recent years. Shirley Jackson was an influential American author. Yet there is no mistaking the happiness and love in these pages, which are crowded with the raucous voices of an extraordinary family living a wonderfully ordinary life.

When we moved into it we had two children and about five thousand books I expect that when we finally overflow and move out again we will have perhaps twenty children and easily half a million books.' Jackson's literary talents are in evidence everywhere, as is her trenchant, unsentimental wit. 'Our house,' writes Jackson, 'is old, noisy, and full. Fans of Please Don't Eat the Daisies, Cheaper by the Dozen, and anything Erma Bombeck ever wrote will find much to recognize in Shirley Jackson's home and neighborhood: children who won't behave, cars that won't start, furnaces that break down, a pugnacious corner bully, household help that never stays, and a patient, capable husband who remains lovingly oblivious to the many thousands of things mothers and wives accomplish every single day. But the writer possessed another side, one which is delightfully exposed in this hilariously charming memoir of her family's life in rural Vermont. Shirley Jackson, author of the classic short story 'The Lottery', was known for her terse, haunting prose.

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