> Skip to content
  • Published: 17 October 2016
  • ISBN: 9780241198209
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 448
  • RRP: $22.99

Let Me Tell You




From the peerless author of The Lottery, a spectacular new volume of unpublished and newly discovered stories, essays, letters and drawings

Let Me Tell You brings together the deliciously eerie short stories Jackson is best known for with frank and inspiring lectures on writing; comic essays she wrote about her large, rowdy family; and revelatory personal letters and drawings. Jackson's landscape here is most frequently domestic - dinner parties, children's games and neighbourly gossip - but one that is continually threatened and subverted in her unsettling, inimitable prose.

  • Published: 17 October 2016
  • ISBN: 9780241198209
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 448
  • RRP: $22.99

About the author

Shirley Jackson

Shirley Jackson was born in San Francisco in 1916. She first received wide critical acclaim for her short story 'The Lottery', which was published in 1949. Her novels - which include The Sundial, The Bird's Nest, Hangsaman, The Road through the Wall, We Have Always Lived in the Castle and The Haunting of Hill House - are characterised by her use of realistic settings for tales that often involve elements of horror and the occult. Raising Demons and Life Among the Savages are her two works of nonfiction. Come Along With Me is a collection of stories, lectures, and part of the novel she was working on when she died in 1965.

Also by Shirley Jackson

See all

Praise for Let Me Tell You

Like a lot of people I read 'The Lottery' when I was young, in an anthology of short stories from the New Yorker, and never forgot it. Let Me Tell You is a rich, enjoyable compendium of Jackson's unpublished short fiction and occasional writings, kicking off with a story of a dozen pages, 'Paranoia', which I won't forget, either

Tom Stoppard, TLS Books of the Year

The stories range from sketches and anecdotes to complete and genuinely unsettling tales, somewhat alarming and very creepy ... For those of us whose imaginations, and creative ambitions, were ignited by 'The Lottery', Jackson remains one of the great practitioners of the literature of the darker impulses

Paul Theroux, New York Times
penguin pop image
penguin pop image