In Rough Country: Essays and Reviews

The "rough country" of my title has a double meaning: it refers to both the treacherous geographical/psychological terrains of the writers who are my subjects ... and also the emotional terrain of my life following the unexpected death of my husband Raymond Smith in February 2008 after forty-eight years of marriage....

Reading and taking notes, especially late at night when I can't sleep, has been the comfort for me that saying the rosary or reading The Book of Common Prayer might be for another. Immersing myself in the imaginations of other writers, constructing a line of argument which is the structure of a literary essay—in contrast to the less calibrated and predictable swerves and leaps of fiction—has been a lifeline.

—Joyce Carol Oates, from the Preface

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Shirley Jackson: Novels and Stories

In this volume, Joyce Carol Oates, our leading practitioner of the contemporary Gothic, presents the essential works of Shirley Jackson, the novels and stories that, from the early 1940s through the mid-1960s, wittily remade the genre of psychological horror for an alienated, postwar America. She opens with The Lottery (1949), Jackson's only collection of short fiction, whose disquieting title story—one of the most widely anthologized tales of the twentieth century—has entered American folklore. Also among these early works are "The Daemon Lover," a story Oates praises as "deeper, more mysterious, and more disturbing than 'The Lottery,'" and "Charles," the hilarious sketch that launched Jackson's secondary career as a domestic humorist.

—Library of America

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