 Cover of the 1st US edition | |
| Author | Shirley Jackson |
|---|---|
| Cover artist | Tom Hallman |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Short stories |
| Publisher | Bantam Books |
Publication date | 1996 |
| Media type | Print (hardcover) |
| Pages | 388 |
| ISBN | 9780553103038 |
Just An Ordinary Day is a posthumous collection of short stories by American writer Shirley Jackson, first published in 1996 by Bantam Books. [1]
According to Jackson's children, Laurence Jackson Hyman and Sarah Hyman DeWitt, an old box bearing no return address (apparently discovered in a Vermont barn), mysteriously appeared on Hyman's front porch at some point during the early 1990s. Inside were the original manuscript for The Haunting of Hill House , six unpublished stories, and many pages of notes. This discovery led Hyman and Dewitt to produce a new collection of their mother's work entitlted Just An Ordinary Day, which contains thirty-two new stories—some of which came from Jackson's unsorted papers that had been sent by her husband to the Library of Congress as well as from the San Francisco Public Library—and twenty-one which had appeared in periodicals, but had never been collected in book form. [2] [3] [4] [5]
The introduction to the collection is written by Hyman and DeWitt; there is also a preface by Jackson entitled "All I Can Remember." [6]
 | This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. (May 2023) |
Part One: Unpublished Stories
Part Two: Uncollected Stories (with periodical of first publication)
Publishers Weekly describes Just An Ordinary Day as a "feast" "[f]or Jackson devotees, as well as first-time readers . . . a virtuoso collection," [2] while Kirkus Reviews writes: "There's rather a lot of inchoate work here . . . and many of the bland titles were obviously only preliminary. Of the unpublished stories, best are such Saki-like models of compact menace . . . as well as two of Jackson's most amusing pictures of embattled motherhood. The uncollected pieces, many of them first published in popular magazines, are nevertheless generally much stronger . . . Even at a bit below the level of her best work, it's nice to have Jackson back again." [31]
Shirley Hardie Jackson was an American writer known primarily for her works of horror and mystery. Over the duration of her writing career, which spanned over two decades, she composed six novels, two memoirs, and more than 200 short stories.
Walter Michael Miller Jr. was an American science fiction writer. His fix-up novel, A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), the only novel published in his lifetime, won the 1961 Hugo Award for Best Novel. Prior to its publication, he was a writer of short stories.
The Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDB) is a database of bibliographic information on genres considered speculative fiction, including science fiction and related genres such as fantasy, alternate history, and horror fiction. The ISFDB is a volunteer effort, with the database being open for moderated editing and user contributions, and a wiki that allows the database editors to coordinate with each other. As of April 2022, the site had catalogued 2,002,324 story titles from 232,816 authors.
Ted Chiang is an American science fiction writer. His work has won four Nebula awards, four Hugo awards, the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and six Locus awards. His short story "Story of Your Life" was the basis of the film Arrival (2016). He was an artist in residence at the University of Notre Dame in 2020–2021. Chiang is also a frequent non-fiction contributor to the New Yorker Magazine, most recently on topics related to computer technology, such as artificial intelligence.
John David Wolverton, better known by his pen names Dave Wolverton and David Farland, was an American author, editor, and instructor of online writing workshops and groups. He wrote in several genres but was known best for his science fiction and fantasy works. Books in his Runelords series hit the New York Times bestsellers list.
"The Lottery" is a short story by Shirley Jackson that was first published in The New Yorker on June 26, 1948. The story describes a fictional small American community that observes an annual tradition known as "the lottery", which is intended to ensure a good harvest and purge the town of bad omens. The lottery, its preparations, and its execution are all described in detail, though it is not revealed until the end what actually happens to the person selected by the random lottery: the selected member of the community is stoned to death by the other townspeople.
Betty Ballantine was an American publisher, editor, and writer. She was born during the Raj to a British colonial family. After her marriage to Ian Ballantine in 1939, she moved to New York where they created Bantam Books in 1945 and established Ballantine Books in 1952. They became freelance publishers in the 1970s. Their son, Richard, was an author and journalist specializing in cycling topics.
Renata Adler is an American author, journalist, and film critic. Adler was a staff writer-reporter for The New Yorker for over thirty years and the chief film critic for The New York Times from 1968 to 1969. She has also published several fiction and non-fiction books, and has been awarded the O. Henry Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the PEN/Hemingway Award.
Joanna Ruth Nichols was a Canadian writer of fiction for children and young adults, primarily historical fiction and historical fantasy.
The Lottery and Other Stories is a 1949 short story collection by American author Shirley Jackson. Published by Farrar, Straus, it includes "The Lottery" and 24 other stories. This was the only collection of her stories to appear during her lifetime. Her later posthumous collections were Come Along with Me, edited by Stanley Edgar Hyman, and Just an Ordinary Day and Let Me Tell You, edited by her children Laurence Jackson Hyman and Sarah Hyman Stewart.
"The Lovely House" is a gothic short story and weird tale by American writer Shirley Jackson, first published in 1950. The story features several overtly gothic elements, including a possibly haunted house, doubling, and the blurring of real and imaginary. It appeared under the title "A Visit" in New World Writing, No. 2, 1952.
Thomas Whiteside was an American journalist.
The Etched City is the first novel of the Australian science-fiction writer K. J. Bishop. It was published for the first time by Prime Books in 2003, then by Tor/Pan Macmillan and by Bantam Spectra. Translations into Italian, Polish, Spanish, Croatian, Serbian, Dutch, Romanian, French, Traditional Chinese, German and Czech have appeared.
Fancies and Goodnights is a collection of fantasies and murder stories by John Collier, first published by Doubleday Books in hardcover in 1951. A paperback edition followed from Bantam Books in 1953, and it has been repeatedly reprinted over more than five decades, most recently in the New York Review Books Classics line, with an introduction by Ray Bradbury. A truncated British edition, omitting roughly one-quarter of the stories, was published under the title Of Demons and Darkness.
Silvia Moreno-Garcia is a Mexican and Canadian novelist, short story writer, editor, and publisher.
Alyssa Wong is an American writer of speculative fiction, comics, poetry, and games. They are a recipient of the Nebula Award, World Fantasy Award, and Locus Award.
Emma Cline is an American writer and novelist, originally from California. She published her first novel, The Girls, in 2016, to positive reviews. The book was shortlisted for the John Leonard Award from the National Book Critics Circle and the Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize. Her second novel, The Guest, was published in 2023. Her stories have been published in The New Yorker, Tin House, Granta, and The Paris Review. In 2017, Cline was named one of Granta's Best of Young American Novelists, and Forbes named her one of their "30 Under 30 in Media.” She is a recipient of the Plimpton Prize.
Carmen Maria Machado is an American short story author, essayist, and critic best known for Her Body and Other Parties, a 2017 short story collection, and her memoir In the Dream House, which was published in 2019 and won the 2021 Folio Prize. Machado is frequently published in The New Yorker, Granta, Lightspeed Magazine, and other publications. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the Nebula Award for Best Novelette. Her stories have been reprinted in Year's Best Weird Fiction, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, Best Horror of the Year,The New Voices of Fantasy, and Best Women's Erotica.
Weike Wang is a Chinese-American author of the novel Chemistry, which won the 2018 PEN/Hemingway Award.
Anne Charnock is a British author of science fiction novels. In 2018, she won the Arthur C. Clarke Award in science fiction, for her novel Dreams Before the Start of Time.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)