90 Classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books

It’s terribly important that I get in touch with a gentleman who may have stopped in here to buy flowers this morning. Terribly important.

Sometimes, the person you think you love isn’t who they seem. And sometimes, you can be your own deception. Spanning Shirley Jackson's entire career, these devilish tales of love, death, and despair show us how all that keeps us safe in suburbia can strike up, leave, and instantly disappear.

Shirley Jackson was born in California in 1916. When her short story, 'The Lottery', was first published in the New Yorker in 1948, readers were so horrified they sent her hate mail; it has since become one of the most iconic American stories of all time. Her first novel, The Road Through the Wall, was published in the same year and was followed by Hangsaman, The Bird's Nest, The Sundial, The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, widely seen as her masterpiece. In addition to her dark, brilliant novels, she wrote lightly fictionalized magazine pieces about family life with her four children and her husband, the critic Stanley Edgar Hyman. Shirley Jackson died in 1965.