We Have Always Lived in the Castle
Shirley Jackson's beloved gothic tale of a peculiar girl named Merricat and her family's dark secret Taking readers deep into a labyrinth of dark neurosis, We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a deliciously unsettling novel about a perverse, isolated, and possibly murderous family and the struggle that ensues when a cousin arrives at their estate. This edition features a new introduction by Jonathan Lethem. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
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1recommend
3mentions
3people
2017–2023years
33% recommend67% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- What about fiction like American Psycho, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Pride and Prejudice, or The Tempest? Do they not deliver social commentary on the human condition that equals (or maybe even surpasses) 1984? Are you equally dismissive of thrillers and romantic films? Is Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy vapid? Was Titanic a froofy waste of film?
- Shades of Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle....
- I don't want discussions and interpretations integrated! At least, if they're there, they need to be trivially disposable, such that only those who actually want to see them do so.
I say this because I have never in my life been rendered so furious by the action of a literary editor as to have Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle completely ruined for me by some importunate jackass who insisted upon putting a long, discursive deconstruction of the entire novel into a preface of an edition I incautiously happened to choose. By the time I realized what I was reading, it was too late, and I found myself unable to appreciate the actual story at all, having had it helpfully predigested for me by this ham-handed oaf who so highly valued his unique and precious insight into what Jackson was really trying to say that he put it first in the book, where it lay in the path of the not perfectly cautious reader as a beartrap in that of a cheerful weekend rambler.
I should like any such initiative as that you describe to take as axiomatic it's worth not doing that kind of thing, is what I'm trying to get across here.
