Читать онлайн «Hangsaman»

Автор Ширли Джексон

PENGUIN CLASSICS

HANGSAMAN

SHIRLEY JACKSON was born in San Francisco in 1916. She first received wide critical acclaim for her short story “The Lottery,” which was first published in The New Yorker in 1948. Her novels—which include The Sundial, The Bird’s Nest, Hangsaman, The Road Through the Wall, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and The Haunting of Hill House—are characterized by her use of realistic settings for tales that often involve elements of horror and the occult. Raising Demons and Life Among the Savages are her two works of nonfiction. She died in 1965.

FRANCINE PROSE is the author of more than twenty books including Blue Angel, a finalist for the National Book Award, and the nonfiction New York Times bestseller Reading Like a Writer. She is a former president of PEN American Center, as well as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

SHIRLEY JACKSON

Hangsaman

Foreword by FRANCINE PROSE

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA) Inc. , 375 Hudson Street,

New York, New York 10014, USA

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

For more information about the Penguin Group visit penguin. com

First published in the United States of America by Farrar, Straus and Young 1951

This edition with a foreword by Francine Prose published in Penguin Books 2013

All rights reserved. No part of this product may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Jackson, Shirley, 1916–1965.

Hangsaman / Shirley Jackson ; foreword by Francine Prose.

pages ; cm. —(Penguin classics)

ISBN 978-1-101-61676-5

I. Title.

PS3519. A392H27 2013

813’. 54—dc23

2013002349

For my children:

Laurence, Joanne, and Sarah

Contents

About the Authors

Title Page

Dedication

Contents

Foreword by FRANCINE PROSE

Epigraph

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Foreword

In the fall of 2010, I taught a college literature course I decided to call “Strange Books. ” For the reading list, I chose the fifteen strangest books I could think of, starting with the stories of Gogol and Kleist and ending with Robert Walser’s Jakob von Gunten and Bruno Schulz’s Street of Crocodiles. All of these books were, and have remained, among my favorite works of fiction.

One of the reasons I regret not having read Shirley Jackson’s Hangsaman until now is that I wish I could have added it to that list, on which it so clearly belonged.

Hangsaman is indeed a very strange novel, but what it shares with the others on my list (works by Jane Bowles, Henry Green, Wallace Shawn, and Roberto Bolaño, among others) is not only oddity but beauty, originality, a certain visionary intensity, and the ability to make us feel as if we have been invited into a private, very intimate world with striking similarities to our world, whatever that might be.