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The Haunting at 60: is it still one of the scariest films ever made?

Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg count the slow-burn 1963 horror as one of the greatest of all time but it wasn’t always seen as a classic

Published: 18 Sep 2023

Top 10s
Top 10 first lines in fiction

The first words of a story have to do a lot of work in snaring the reader. Novelist Liz Nugent considers some of her favourites

Published: 5 Apr 2023

Top 10s
Top 10 horror short stories

With Halloween looming, these tales by authors from Shirley Jackson to Stephen King are guaranteed to keep you awake as the nights close in

Published: 26 Oct 2022

Unseen works by ‘queen of gothic fiction’ Shirley Jackson published

Two previously unseen short stories by Jackson, rated by Stephen King as one of the great horror fiction writers, are to appear in US magazine the Strand

Published: 9 Jun 2022

What we're reading
What we’re reading: writers and readers on the books they enjoyed in May

Poet Dean Atta, writer and critic PD Smith and Guardian readers Jessica and Brenda discuss the titles they’ve read over the last month. Join the conversation in the comments

Published: 24 May 2022

‘My job was to let my mother talk’: Shirley Jackson’s son on a book of her letters

In a revealing new book, the under-appreciated author’s son shows a new side to his misunderstood mother

Published: 4 Aug 2021

Top 10s
Top 10 novels set in villages

From Chinua Achebe to Agatha Christie and Shirley Jackson, these books play with our assumptions about small communities

Published: 24 Mar 2021

Guy Lodge's streaming and DVDs
Streaming: the best films about writers

Elisabeth Moss’s fevered turn as American gothic novelist Shirley Jackson is the latest chapter in cinema’s tireless quest to dramatise the literary life

Published: 2 Jan 2021

Unseen Shirley Jackson story to be published

Adventure on a Bad Night, in which a shopping trip unpicks layers of prejudice, was written in 1944 and rediscovered by the son of a writer fascinated by ‘the possibility of evil’

Published: 17 Dec 2020

3 out of 5 stars.

Peter Bradshaw's film of the week
Shirley review – Elisabeth Moss gets under a horror writer's skin
3 out of 5 stars.

Moss bristles with malevolence as a fictionalised version of Shirley Jackson but the film’s early menace fizzles out

Published: 29 Oct 2020

History remixed: the rise of the anachronistic female lead

The lives of women from history, from Catherine the Great to Shirley Jackson, are being brought to the screen with a radical focus on character over facts

Published: 4 Jun 2020
'She puts you into a dream': inside a thrilling film about Shirley Jackson

Shirley, a film by Josephine Decker, transforms the life of the notorious horror author into a dark psychodrama of her own making

Published: 3 Jun 2020

Top 10s
Top 10 books about imaginary friends

From Lewis Carroll to Vladimir Nabokov and Shirley Jackson, the best of these stories combine fantasy with very real psychology

Published: 26 Feb 2020

4 out of 5 stars.

First look review
Shirley review – Elisabeth Moss anchors darkly compelling literary psychodrama
4 out of 5 stars.

A perversely entertaining take on a brief period of Shirley Jackson’s life gives the star one of her most daring roles to date

Published: 26 Jan 2020

Inside the Guardian
Guardian Books: 'You can tell a lot about a country by how it treats its libraries'

The books site editor on the challenges facing publishers, and who she would invite to her dream dinner party

Published: 15 Jun 2019

Agoraphobia and an unhappy marriage: the real horror behind The Haunting of Hill House

Stephen King says The Haunting of Hill House is ‘nearly perfect’. But can a Netflix TV adaptation capture Shirley Jackson’s dark visions of duty and domesticity?

Published: 22 Oct 2018
'Textbook terror': How The Haunting of Hill House rewrote horror's rules

Authors from Joe Hill to Andrew Michael Hurley consider why this 1959 novel, poised for a Netflix adaptation, holds such enduring power to chill

Published: 11 Oct 2018

The Guardian Books podcast
Halloween reading with Andrew Michael Hurley – books podcast

As nights grow darker, we share our favourite horror novels and ghostly tales – and the author of The Loney joins us to talk about his eerie new novel

Podcast

Published: 24 Oct 2017

About 35 results for Shirley Jackson

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