One of the most terrifying stories of the twentieth century, Shirley Jacksons The Lottery created a sensation when it was first published in The New Yorker in 1948. "Power and haunting," and "nights of unrest" were typical reader responses. Today it is considered a classic work of short fiction, a story remarkable for its combination of subtle suspense and pitch-perfect descriptions of both the chilling and the mundane.

The Lottery and Other Stories, the only collection of stories to appear during Shirley Jackson's lifetime, unites "The Lottery" with twenty-four equally unusual short stories. Together they demonstrate Jackson's remarkable rangefrom the hilarious to the horrible, the unsettling to the ominousand her power as a storyteller.

The stories remind one of the elemental terrors of childhood. James Hilton, Herald Tribune

In her art, as in her life, Shirley Jackson was an absolute original. She listened to her own voice, kept her own counsel, isolated herself from all intellectual and literary currents . . . . She was unique. Newsweek

Shirley Jackson is unparalleled as a leader in the field of beautifully written, quiet, cumulative shudders.
Dorothy Parker, Esquire

I implore you not to read this story unless you can take a day or a week afterward to think about it. A great story, like a great vintage, throws a crust of sediment which may destroy the bouquet and cause ulcers later. If you dont feel the tweak of the ulcers, you havent really read this story.
Christopher Morley, author of The Haunted Bookshop

Perhaps more than anything else, the horror story or horror movie says its okay to join the mob, to become the total tribal being, to destroy the outsider. It has never been done better or more literally than in Shirley Jacksons short story The Lottery.
Stephen King, Danse Macabre

One of [the twentieth] centurys most luminous and strange American writers . . . Shirley Jackson wrote about the mundane evils hidden in everyday life and about the warring and subsuming of selves in a family, a community, and sometimes even in a single mind.
Jonathan Lethem, Salon

Everything this author wrote . . . had in it the dignity and plausibility of myth . . . Shirley Jackson knew better than any writer since Hawthorne the value of haunted things.
Guy Davenport, The New York Times Book Review