Shelley Jackson (1) (1963–)
Forfatter af Half Life
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Om forfatteren
Shelley Jackson studied at Brown University and now lives in New York City.
Image credit: Author Shelley Jackson at the 2018 Texas Book Festival in Austin, Texas, United States. By Larry D. Moore, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=74426030
Værker af Shelley Jackson
Riddance: Or: The Sybil Joines Vocational School for Ghost Speakers & Hearing-Mouth Children (2018) 63 eksemplarer
Angel 1 eksemplar
Husband 1 eksemplar
"Here is the Church" 1 eksemplar
Vitriol (short work) 1 eksemplar
Egg (in GRAND STREET 70 - STEIN) 1 eksemplar
La melancolia del corpo 1 eksemplar
Associated Works
Stranger Things Happen: Stories (2001) — Omslagsfotograf/tegner/..., nogle udgaver — 1,692 eksemplarer
My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales (2010) — Bidragyder — 986 eksemplarer
The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases (2003) — Bidragyder — 770 eksemplarer
The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Seventeenth Annual Collection (2004) — Bidragyder — 232 eksemplarer
The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Eighteenth Annual Collection (2005) — Bidragyder — 223 eksemplarer
The Monkey's Wedding and Other Stories (2011) — Omslagsfotograf/tegner/..., nogle udgaver — 131 eksemplarer
ParaSpheres: Extending Beyond the Spheres of Literary and Genre Fiction: Fabulist and New Wave Fabulist Stories (2006) — Bidragyder — 60 eksemplarer
Significant Objects: 100 Extraordinary Stories about Ordinary Things (2012) — Bidragyder — 57 eksemplarer
The Dictionary of Failed Relationships: 26 Tales of Love Gone Wrong (2003) — Bidragyder — 56 eksemplarer
The Best American Poetry 2023 (The Best American Poetry series) (2023) — Bidragyder — 20 eksemplarer
Wreckage of Reason: An Anthology of Contemporary Xxperimental Prose by Women Writers (2008) — Bidragyder — 7 eksemplarer
Satte nøgleord på
Almen Viden
- Fødselsdato
- 1963
- Køn
- female
- Nationalitet
- USA
- Fødested
- Philippines
- Bopæl
- Philippines (born)
Berkeley, California, USA - Uddannelse
- Stanford University (BA art)
Brown University (MFA creative writing) - Erhverv
- writer
artist - Relationer
- Lethem, Jonathan (husband|divorced)
Medlemmer
Anmeldelser
Lister
Hæderspriser
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Associated Authors
Statistikker
- Værker
- 15
- Also by
- 27
- Medlemmer
- 699
- Popularitet
- #36,217
- Vurdering
- 3.7
- Anmeldelser
- 24
- ISBN
- 21
- Sprog
- 2
- Udvalgt
- 5
In theory, it seems that the Headmistress and Grandison are supposed to share the role of protagonist. In practice, it is much more Sybil's story than Grandison's -- even if their life stories are given equal page time (I didn't count), the inclusion of Sybil's correspondence and transcripts of her journeys through the Land of the Dead give her more focus. She also seems a more central figure, narratively, than Grandison. In particular, it is established through a frame narrative by a modern scholar researching the school that every successive headmistress is Sybil; that is, their job is to channel Sybil so that she may continue running the school after her death. Thus, Grandison's ambition (which she does, ultimately, achieve) is to abnegate her own identity to become a vessel for Sybil.
In Grandison's narrative, she explicitly raises several questions about race in the context of spirit-channeling that the novel then immediately drops and never returns to. Why, she asks, are all the spirits channeled by Sybil and her students white people who are fluent English-speakers? The reader will never know, as the issue is not explored -- simply mentioned and then forgotten. What, she wonders briefly, does it mean for her as a mixed-race person to become the headmistress and allow a white woman to speak through her? Is the opportunity for a position of authority worth that cost? This issue, too, is never mentioned again, and the reader is not privy to the thought processes that lead her to go through with it in the end.
In addition, for a novel that purports to be about language, it seems to have very little understanding of linguistics. Of course, it is possible to talk about language in a literary sense without delving into linguistics, but the problem is that the novel does attempt to get into topics such as grammars and writing systems, and when it does, the lack of research is evident. For example, the Headmistress at one point creates a writing system for English based on drawings of the mouth and tongue positions required to make a given sound. This is described as resulting in twenty-six characters, one for each letter of the alphabet. The problem is that sounds (or, in linguistics terms, phonemes) in English don't correspond neatly to the alphabet at all -- standard American English has thirty-eight to forty different phonemes. And I'm sorry, but if you don't know the difference between a phoneme and a grapheme, I am not interested in anything you have to say about writing systems. This is basic stuff.
Ultimately, despite an intriguing concept, Riddance fell flat on several counts, and I felt its halfhearted attempts to address racial issues were almost worse than not mentioning them at all.… (mere)