The Uncanny Reader (71 page)

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SHIRLEY JACKSON (1916–1965)
wrote more than one hundred novels, short stories, and plays, including the iconic “The Lottery.” In her works she often explored themes of psychological turmoil, isolation, prejudice, and the inequity of fate. Many of Jackson's works take place in the small, xenophobic towns of New England, where she and her husband, Professor Stanley Edgar Hyman, wrote and taught. Her major works include the novels
We Have Always Lived in the Castle
and
The Haunting of Hill House
, now regarded as “the quintessential haunted house tale.” Dorothy Parker called Jackson “unparalleled as a leader in the field of beautifully written, quiet, cumulative shudders.” The Library of America recently honored Jackson by publishing an anthology of her literary works, edited by Joyce Carol Oates. The Jackson family has been carefully combing through the voluminous material that their mother had left behind—fifty-two cartons containing nearly seventy-five hundred items, which are archived at the Library of Congress. “Paranoia” is one of the previously unpublished stories that the Jackson family found; its publication in
The New Yorker
in August 2013 represented the first time that Jackson had been published in the magazine in sixty years.

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FRANZ KAFKA (1883–1924)
is best known for such stories as
Metamorphosis,
“The Hunger Artist,” and “In the Penal Colony,” as well as the novels
The Trial
and
The Castl
e. Critic Erich Heller once described him as “the creator of the most obscure lucidity in the history of literature,” and it is perhaps no accident that the term “Kafkaesque”—however misused—has so thoroughly entered the daily lexicon. Born into a Jewish family in Prague, Kafka studied at German-language schools and Charles University, earning a law degree there in 1906. An insurance official for most of his life, he pursued his writing late at night. “The Stoker” (1913) is one of the few of Kafka's works to see publication during his lifetime and is the first chapter of his projected novel,
Amerika/The Man Who Disappeared
. That this novel and many other of Kafka's works are with us today we owe to his friend Max Brod, who found himself unable to fulfill Kafka's final wish: the destruction of all his unpublished and unfinished manuscripts.

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KELLY LINK
is the author of the story collections
Stranger Things Happen
,
Magic for Beginners,
and
Pretty Monsters,
as well as the founder, with her husband, Gavin J. Grant, of Small Beer Press. A fourth collection of stories,
Get in Trouble
, is forthcoming from Random House in 2015.

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H. P. LOVECRAFT (HOWARD PHILLIPS LOVECRAFT, 1890–1937)
is widely recognized as one of the most significant horror writers of the twentieth century. Lovecraft created the “Cthulhu Mythos,” a sprawling universe populated by insane, indifferent, and unknowable horrors. Lovecraft freely lent his creation to his many protégés and correspondents, among them Robert Howard (creator of Conan the Barbarian) and Robert Bloch (author of
Psycho).
Lovecraft also penned
Supernatural Horror in Literature,
one of the first substantive examinations of the horror genre. In this seminal essay, Lovecraft wrote, “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” Lovecraft died in poverty in 1937, but today his influence can be felt widely in popular culture and in the work of many of the finest contemporary writers of the weird and the supernatural.

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HENRI-RENÉ-ALBERT-GUY DE MAUPASSANT (1850–1893)
is considered a founding father of the modern short story. In a legendary dozen-year creative run from 1880 to his death, Maupassant penned more than three hundred short stories, of which just over a tenth are fantastical, as well as six novels, starting with
Une Vie
(A Woman's Life). He was raised by his mother, who risked the then-public shame of divorce to escape his abusive father. At the age of eighteen, he saved Swinburne from drowning, for which the English poet, among other displays of gratitude, introduced him to that macabre artifact a dried human hand, which Maupassant later came to own and which features in no fewer than three of his tales. Flaubert took the author under his wing as a protégé. “On the Water” dates from the March 1876 issue of
Le Bulletin Français
, under the title “In a Dinghy,” and in 1881 was collected in the author's first book of stories,
La Maison Tellier
. At a time when river life was favored by leisured society, Maupassant himself was an avid boater and a regular at the floating café La Grenouillère, depicted by both Monet and Renoir.

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CHINA MIÉVILLE
is the award-winning author of several novels, including
The City & the City
,
Embassytown
, and
Railsea
, and of various short stories. His nonfiction includes the book
Between Equal Rights,
a study of international law; and the essay “London's Overthrow,” on London after the riots of 2011.

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STEVEN MILLHAUSER
is the author of twelve works of fiction, including
Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer, Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer,
and, most recently,
We Others: New and Selected Stories
. His work has appeared in
Tin House, McSweeney's, The New Yorker, Harper's,
and other publications. His story “Eisenheim the Illusionist” was the basis of the 2006 film
The Illusionist
. He teaches at Skidmore College and lives in Saratoga Springs, New York.

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JOYCE CAROL OATES
is a recipient of the National Humanities, Medal, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the
Chicago Tribune
Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction and has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.

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YOKO OGAWA
is the author of more than twenty works of fiction and nonfiction, including the story collection
Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales
, in which “Old Mrs. J” appears. Her novels include
The Diving Pool, The Housekeeper and the Professor,
and
Hotel Iris
. Her fiction has won every major Japanese literary award and has appeared in
The New Yorker, A Public Space,
and
Zoetrope
. Her novel
The Housekeeper and the Professor
was adapted into a film,
The Professor's Beloved Equation
. She lives in Ashiya, Japan, with her husband and son.

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DEAN PASCHAL,
originally from Albany, Georgia, now lives in New Orleans, where he works as an emergency room physician. “Moriya,” included in this volume, was his first published story and was reprinted in
The Best American Short Stories 2003
. He has a book of short stories,
By the Light of the Jukebox,
which was brought out by Ontario Review Press in 2002—the stories in which have appeared in many anthologies, including
The Pushcart Prize,
Press 53's
Surreal South,
Norton's
New Sudden Fiction,
and Portals Press'
Something in the Water
. His novel,
The Frog Surgeon
, was released in September of 2013 by Portals Press, New Orleans.

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EDGAR ALLAN POE (1809–1849)
was born to traveling actors in Boston and, after their deaths, raised by John and Frances Allan of Richmond, Virginia. He published his first book,
Tamerlane,
at the age of eighteen. After a brief period at West Point, Poe began his lifelong work as a writer, magazine editor, and critical reviewer for literary magazines. Widely acknowledged as the inventor of the modern detective story, a pioneer of modern science fiction, and the nation's first great literary critic, Poe also helped usher the gothic tale into the modern era by shifting its settings from ancient castles to houses, libraries, and schools and by bringing a terrifying psychological realism to the horror story. “Berenice”—one of his most violent and disturbing stories—first appeared in 1835 in
The Southern Literary Messenger
and was later included in volume 2 of
Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque
, volume 1 of which contained such well-known stories as “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “William Wilson,” and “MS Found in a Bottle.” Poe died at the age of forty, under mysterious circumstances, in Baltimore, Maryland.

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KAREN RUSSELL
is the author of three books, including the story collections
St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves
(2006) and
Vampires in the Lemon Grove
(2013). Her novel,
Swamplandia,
was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize and was included in the
New York Times
' Ten Best Books of 2011. Her short fiction has appeared in such publications as
The Best American Short Stories, The New Yorker, Granta, Zoetrope,
and
Oxford American.
Recipient of a 2013 MacArthur Foundation grant, she lives in New York and has taught writing and literature at several universities and colleges, including Columbia University, Williams College, Bard College, and Bryn Mawr.

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BRUNO SCHULZ (1892–1942)
was born into a family of cloth merchants who owned a shop on the market square of Drohobycz. Schulz rarely left the town; although the town itself would pass in his lifetime from Austrian, to Polish, to Soviet, and to Nazi jurisdiction. Schulz became an art teacher there, at his old school. He wrote his stories there, mythologized accounts of his own childhood, which recount the progressive illness of his aging father and the family's descent into financial ruin, stories populated by outré relatives and townspeople who testify richly to a way of life now gone, swept away in the Holocaust. Schulz would be murdered in the town in which he was born, by a Nazi officer who reportedly then went to a colleague to say, “You shot my Jew, so I have shot yours.” Schulz's fame rests on his talents as both a visual artist and a writer. He first gained fame in 1922, when his
Book of Idolatry
, a collection of stylish and erotic
cliché-verre
pictures, was presented in Warsaw and L'vov. But it is his two volumes of short stories,
Cinnamon Shops and Other Stories
and
Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass
, that have gained him immortality and a reputation as the greatest modern prose stylist of the Polish language.

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C. NAMWALI SERPELL
was born in Zambia in 1980 and moved to the United States when she was eight. She is an assistant professor in the English Department at the University of California, Berkeley. Her creative work has appeared in
Callaloo, The Believer, Bidoun, Tin House, The Caine Prize Anthology,
and a collection,
Should I Go to Grad School?
Her first short story, “Muzungu,” appeared in
The Best American Short Stories 2009
(ed. Alice Sebold) and was short-listed for the 2010 Caine Prize for African Writing. In 2011 she won a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award for women writers, on the basis of excerpts from a novel in progress. She lives in San Francisco.

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STEVE STERN
grew up in Memphis, Tennessee. His books include
The Frozen Rabbi,
a novel, and
The Wedding Jester,
a collection of stories for which he received the National Jewish Book Award.
The Book of Mischief: New and Selected Stories
was published by Graywolf Press in 2012. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim and Fulbright foundations.

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KARIN TIDBECK
is the award-winning author of
Jagannath
and
Amatka.
She lives and works in Malmö, Sweden, where she makes a living as a freelance teacher and consultant on all things fictional and interactive. She writes in Swedish and English and has published short stories and poetry in Swedish since 2002 and English since 2010. Her publication history includes
Weird Tales,
Tor.com
,
Lightspeed Magazine,
and the anthologies
Steampunk Revolution
and
The Time Travelers Almanac
.

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EDITH WHARTON (EDITH NEWBOLD JONES, 1862–1937)
published over forty volumes of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry over the course of her distinguished writing career and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1921 for her novel
The Age of Innocence.
Acclaimed for her keenly observed fictional chronicles of upper-class New York society, Wharton moved to France in 1907 and lived there until the end of her life. She was awarded the Cross of the French Legion of Honor for her philanthropic work in that country during World War I. Along with her friend and mentor Henry James, Wharton had an abiding interest in the psychological ghost story. “Pomegranate Seed” originally appeared in
The Saturday Evening Post
on April 25, 1931. It was subsequently included in Wharton's collection of short fiction
The World Over
(1936) and reprinted in her collection
Ghosts,
published the year of her death. In Wharton's preface to
Ghosts,
she remarked that “the teller of supernatural tales should be well frightened in the telling; for if he is, he may perhaps communicate to his readers the sense of that strange something undreamt of in the philosophy of Horatio.”