Episode 29: The Lottery

Explicit content warning

03/01/20 • 83 min

Better Read than Dead: Literature from a Left Perspective

Megan is back to lead our discussion of Shirley Jackson’s most famous work, “The Lottery” (1948), and hoo boy, do we talk about how mad the readers were when this was published. The New Yorker famously lost like a billion subscriptions and got a grazillion angry letters from their readership of middlebrow prudes, who wondered, “is it based on reality? Do these practices still continue in back-country England, the human sacrifice for the rich harvest? It’s a frightening thought.” Even though Shirley Jackson, in her essay “Biography of a Story,” claims “it’s just a story I wrote,” we discuss totalitarianism, the terror of the rural, the expanded family, and the history of strange rites in literature (and movies for, like, a minute.) We also talk about how we all read it in high school and what a trip it was to read with our peers.

We read The New Yorker’s archival version. While there is scant academic writing on Jackson, we recommend Ruth Franklin’s biography A Rather Haunted Life, and suggest checking out Elaine Showalter’s review of it in The Washington Post, where she reminds us that “behind her cheery masks, Jackson was hiding an angry, vengeful self, dreaming of divorce and flight to a place where she could be alone and write,” which is truly our kind of broad.

Find us on Twitter and Instagram @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at [email protected]. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

Find us on Twitter and Instagram @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at [email protected]. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

Previous Episode

Episode 28: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) allows us to take up a crucial question -- is it a ship or a boat? Well, it’s actually a raft, on a river, but even Tristan doesn’t hold that against this blistering satire of Antebellum American society. We talk about the novel’s fraught racial politics, its scathing critiques of the plantation class, and its interesting (and troubling) commentary on nineteenth-century constructions of childhood. We also talk about the Mississippi River and how Twain understands it as a symbol of enslavement and freedom, capital, and liminality.

We read and recommend the Norton Critical Edition edited by Thomas Cooley. However, Toni Morrison’s introduction in the 1996 Oxford edition is a fantastic discussion of both the novel’s major themes and the broader debates about how Twain treats race and racism.

*Note to our listeners. Megan is on maternity leave, but she’ll be back next week!

Find us on Twitter and Instagram @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at [email protected]. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

Next Episode

Episode 30: Rob Roy

If you were to write an historical novel about the Scottish hero-outlaw Rob Roy MacGregor, you’d probably make it about Roy Roy, right? Well, you are an amateur, because that, comrades, is just not how Walter Scott rolls -- which actually shows us why his theory of history is pretty sophisticated. His sprawling Rob Roy (1817) is in fact about a failson named Francis Osbaldistone, with world-historical figures and Rob Roy himself sword-fighting, kilt-wearing, and doing other manly-man things around the periphery. We’re talking Marxism and history, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century constructions of the nation, and how lots of Scott’s (brunette, “Celtic”) heroines are kinda domme-y. This is a deep dive into Tristan’s dorkdom, so buckle up.

We read and highly recommend the Oxford edition edited by Ian Duncan. For more on Scott’s central role in nineteenth-century Scottish literature and modern conceptions of the nation, see Duncan’s marvelous Scott’s Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh.

Our outro music this week is “Donald MacGillivray,” a song about the Jacobite risings, by the Scottish folk band Silly Wizard, used with permission. Many thanks to the band!

Find us on Twitter and Instagram @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at [email protected]. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.