Episode 29: The Lottery

Megan is back to lead our discussion of Shirley Jackson’s most famous work, “The Lottery” (1948), and hoo boy, do we talk about how mad the readers were when this was published. The New Yorker famously lost like a billion subscriptions and got a grazillion angry letters from their readership of middlebrow prudes, who wondered, “is it based on reality? Do these practices still continue in back-country England, the human sacrifice for the rich harvest? It’s a frightening thought.” Even though Shirley Jackson, in her essay “Biography of a Story,” claims “it’s just a story I wrote,” we discuss totalitarianism, the terror of the rural, the expanded family, and the history of strange rites in literature (and movies for, like, a minute.) We also talk about how we all read it in high school and what a trip it was to read with our peers.

We read The New Yorker’s archival version. While there is scant academic writing on Jackson, we recommend Ruth Franklin’s biography A Rather Haunted Life, and suggest checking out Elaine Showalter’s review of it in The Washington Post, where she reminds us that “behind her cheery masks, Jackson was hiding an angry, vengeful self, dreaming of divorce and flight to a place where she could be alone and write,” which is truly our kind of broad.

Find us on Twitter and Instagram @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at [email protected]. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.