The Lottery And Other Stories (2005) - Plot & Excerpts
Well, who couldn't love this collection? There may be some who, knowing "The Lottery" and Ms. Jackson's reputation for that classic tale and a handful of other "weird stories", and with no thanks to the packaging ("a literary sorceress" proclaims the back, "the most haunting writer of our time" proclaims the front), come to this expecting it to be all strange and weird, if not actual horror. And they would be disappointed, because the majority of the stories here are literary first and foremost, although Ms. Jackson always has an eye for the odd detail or strange atmosphere. Only the titular tale, "Colloquy", "Pillar of Salt" and "The Tooth" range into the odd, but even then it's all about the psychology of the individual or situation, unsettling more than horrifying ("The Lottery" excepted, of course).But what a writer! You marvel at the economy of verbiage, the attention to dialogue transcribed as people actually speak, the ability to elide information gracefully so as to further the ends of the tale, the art of construction in prose and character. Purely amazing. Aside from "The Lottery" (about which much has already been said, and what could I add except to say it deserves every bit of praise it gets), the real winners in this collection are surprising in their variety. "The Witch" is a simple story of a boy with an overactive imagination on a train ride and a man who tells a story. "The Renegade" is incredibly moving, as a housewife just transplanted to the rural wilds has to contend with the family dog's depredations on the local chickens (Women are, of course, Ms. Jackson's forte, and especially city women in the country and country women in the city; women with failed dreams and women who wonder how they got where they are, with husbands and children)."Flower Garden", one of the two longish stories here (the other is "Elizabeth"), is a subtle tale of small-town myopia and racial bigotry in which Jackson sketches out invisible cultural scaffoldings with ease (a more subtle take on racial interaction is offered in the short "After You, My Dear Alphonse" which illustrates some ideas about what would now be called, and for ease I'd refer to as, "liberal guilt" if I didn't consider it a propaganda term used by idiotic cultural warriors out to destroy human compassion).Many of the stories are wryly funny. "Dorothy, My Grandmother and the Sailors" is a hilarious piece about perceptions regarding the danger of lecherous sailors, and "Colloquy" is a wonderful short that lays bare the deepest problems haunting Jackson's middle-class culture in the mid-40s, all in 2 pages (and all while being funny - take that all you drabblers and flash fiction writers!). "The Dummy" rings some small changes on the classic "ventriloquist living through his dummy" trope (to quite humorous effect) and "Of Course" is an extremely funny tale about cultural snobbery."The Tooth" and "Pillar of Salt" are real gems which should be as well known as "The Lottery". "The Tooth", a surrealistic story of a women suffering a disabling toothache, numbed by codeine and lack of sleep as she is packed off onto a bus overnight and sent to the big city for an extraction, features Jackson's control of mood and dreamlike detail of focus in masterful form. "Pillar of Salt" concerns a husband and wife from rural New England who return to New York City for a much longed-for two week vacation, only for the wife to be overwhelmed by the pace, tone, identity and reality of the city. A fascinating story that I really identified with as it combined two topics near to me - an almost Futurist (as in the art movement) description of the city as a whirling dynamo grinding everything and everyone around it into powder, and a personal take on what we would now call an anxiety attack. Simply incredible!There are many other strong pieces here. Many concern women or men living in the alienating big city, dealing with identity and class - "Like Mother Used To Make", "Trial By Combat", "The Villager", "Come Dance With Me In Ireland", "Elizabeth" - this last one especially being a sad, emotionally brutal tale of broken dreams and how they engender cheap cruelty. Some are simple humor pieces about work or children - "Charles", "My Life With R.H. Macy", "Afternoon In Linen" - and others are varied sketches of human interaction - "The Intoxicated" (in which a drunken party guest contends with the cynical worldview of a young schoolgirl), "Seven Types Of Ambiguity" (which seems to be about the worth of things) and "Men With Their Big Shoes" (which is another one of these stories that seems simple enough on the surface but digs deeply into women's pain, in this case running it up against culture and class assumptions).Finally, in a writer as delicate and concise as Jackson, there are going to be stories so subtle (or possibly stories that make such subtle cultural assumptions of their times on the part of the reader that the point can't help but be missed by the modern peruser) that I find myself unable to articulate the point. In this case "A Fine Old Firm" (which might be another class story) and "Got A Letter From Jimmy" (which could be about husband and wife dynamics) both eluded me.Well worth reading to rediscover a major American writing talent too often subsumed under her "classic texts".
"Glancing down at her feet, she saw a dime on the sidewalk and tried to pick it up, but there were too many people for her to bend down, and she was afraid to shove to make room for fear of being stared at. She put her foot on the dime and then saw a quarter near it, and a nickel. Someone dropped a pocketbook, she thought, and put her other foot on the quarter, stepping quickly to make it look natural; then she saw another dime and another nickel, and a third dime in the gutter. People were passing her, back and forth, all the time, rushing, pushing against her, not looking at her, and she was afraid to get down and start gathering up the money. Other people saw it and went past, and she realized that no one was going to pick it up. They were all embarrassed, or in too much of a hurry, or too crowded. A taxi stopped to let someone off, and she hailed it. She lifted her feet off the dime and the quarter, and left them there when she got into the taxi. This taxi went slowly and bumped as it went; she had begun to notice that the gradual decay was not peculiar to the taxis. The buses were cracking open in unimportant seams, the leather seats broken and stained. The buildings were going, too--in one of the nicest stores there had been a great gaping hole in the tiled foyer, and you walked around it. Corners of the buildings seemed to be crumbling away into fine dust that drifted downward, the granite was eroding unnoticed. Every window she saw on her way uptown seemed to be broken; perhaps every street corner was peppered with small change. The people were moving faster than ever before; a girl in a red hat appeared at the upper side of the taxi window and was gone beyond the lower side before you could see the hat; store windows were so terribly bright because you only caught them for a fraction of a second. The people seemed hurled on in a frantic action that made every hour forty-five minutes long, every day nine hours, every year fourteen days. Food was so elusively fast, eaten in such a hurry, that you were always hungry, always speeding to a new meal with new people. Everything was imperceptibly quicker every minute. She stepped into the taxi on one side and stepped out the other side at her home; she pressed the fifth-floor button on the elevator and was coming down again, bathed and dressed and ready for dinner with Brad. They went out for dinner and were coming in again, hungry and hurrying to bed in order to get breakfast with lunch beyond. They had been in New York nine days; tomorrow was Saturday and they were going to Long Island, coming home Sunday, and then Wednesday they were going home, really home. By the time she had thought of it they were on the train to Long Island; the train was broken, the seats torn and the floor dirty; one of the doors wouldn't open and the windows wouldn't shut. Passing through the outskirts of the city, she thought, It's as though everything were traveling so fast that the solid stuff couldn't stand it and were going to pieces under the strain, cornices blowing off and windows caving in. She knew she was afraid to say it truly, afraid to face the knowledge that it was a voluntary neck-breaking speed, a deliberate whirling faster and faster to end in destruction."
What do You think about The Lottery And Other Stories (2005)?
"25 Demonic Stories", my arse!I am so utterly disappointed!I picked up this book because I expected it to contain a bunch of creepy short stories, as the subtitle suggests. I was in the right mood for something slightly scary, but what I got was just a collection of short stories of almost normal everyday life:- Two little girls who get talked into believing that sailors on shore leave are bad guys - not creepy!- A man who invites his neighbor over for dinner, and when another visitor appears, the neighbor suddenly pretends that it is her appartment they are in, in order to impress the other visitor - not scary!- A woman who waits for the man who has promised to marry her, and when he does not show up, she tries to trace him - totally not scary!- etc. There may be two or three mildly creepy stories, but to promote this book by saying it was 25 of them, is simply wrong. The publisher had better stuck to the truth. I am so frustrated now that I will delete "We Have Always Lived in the Castle" ("Wir haben schon immer im Schloß gelebt") by the same author, that has been on my wish list for a while.Way to go, Diogenes Verlag!
—Martini
Let us speak of the Lottery.Let us speak of the Lottery in such a way that the conversation here will "age badly", because lo and behold another legality will indict those who destroy property and declare innocent those who destroy lives and render this specific commentary out of date. Let us speak of a very US-centric issue of race and murder and the hallowed halls of police brutality and of Justice founded on the single principle of the Lottery. Let us speak of a time where the laws may have been more overt but the mentality was ever the same, the mythos of the infamous 50's of the United States and how much farther we US citizens have come since then except, of course, last night 6 o'clock Pacific Time or hearabouts due to the prosecutor's insistence on spending time blaming the protests, the social media, any and all publicizing of dissent not intimately processed by corporation and incorporated, proved that was not the case.I have full faith in the capabilities of the average US city equipped with a white majority to partake in the human sacrifice of the Lottery. Those of you who have read it, notice how the chosen did not run. Those of you who have read it, notice how the chosen cooperatively entered the noose of the group's making. Those of you who have read it, be aware that it is legal to burn a US flag on US soil, be aware that a white policeman was recently fired for killing the dog of a white family while the murderer of a black man got away scot-free, and ultimately be aware that any institution in this country that violates this country's Amendments in order to "do its job", especially one that is and was never legally obligated to protect said country's citizens, partakes not in justice, but in terrorism. If the first word out of your mouth in reaction to social justice protests is "looting", you value a handbag more than the life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness of your fellow human beings. If you complain about feeling "left out" of the current social justice movement due to your white privilege, keep in mind the US media would value your death more than the massacre of the US population of black people in its entirety. If you cheer at the Hunger Games franchise or any other commodified rebellion composed of white people encouraged to violence in reaction to an unjust government and deified thereon out, then turn around and boo the protesters of Ferguson and their allies worldwide, your values are based on Entertainment, not Truth. Should you read this book, you'll find yourself in good company with those Jackson reveals with a turning over of the society stone to the seething sadism beneath.I look at the short stories in this book and I look at the news broadcasts on cable television and I see nothing has changed. By rights I, white privilege intact, should not be speaking at all, for I am able to safely feel rage while others must deal with overwhelming terror. However, Goodreads is not the greatest when it comes to interweaving the strength of literature with the struggles of life. Until someone comes along who is more fit to speak of these issues than I will ever be due to reasons of biology and of luck, I will begin the conversation. It's the least I can do.P.S. The KKK supports Darren Wilson, North Korea is calling the US a graveyard for human rights, and neo-lynching is still going strong. How's that for progress.P.S.S. The only issue I have with Jackson is that she's not Flannery O'Connor. She did, however, get the groupthink issue down pat, so kudos to her.
—Aubrey
I can't believe I never wrote a review on The Lottery yet! This was a story that I have ready probably close to 50 times. I read it the first time in high school (way too many years ago), and it has stuck with me. This book had me thinking late into the night about how the lottery winner could have been me. Then I would sit and think things like:Why would people allow this to happen?Can traditions really be that strong?When it's wrong, why do people do it anyway?How can people be so cruel?That and about a million other questions would keep me up late into the night. Some stories stick with you your entire life, teach you things and once in a great while, you will find the story that will really make a difference to you. This was that story for me. I HIGHLY recommend The Lottery to everyone. I think this classic should be read by everyone - at least once - and hopefully walk away with something meaningful.
—Amy
