Shelley Jackson takes Robert Burton's THE ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY as a starting point, dividing her stories into four sections named after Burton's four "humours" (Choler, Melancholy, Phlegm, and Blood). Her stories create a fantastic world in which non-human entities take on the characteristics of the human body. The city of London, for example, menstruates.

Shelly Jackson’s remarkable fiction interrogates the intersection of the body and narrative forms. In her ground-breaking PATCHWORK GIRL, Jackson created a hypertextual online novel around the premise that the author Mary Shelley had created a female piecemeal person. The novel was acclaimed, not only for its innovative form, but also for its eerie and compelling plotlines. Jackson followed this project up with a short-story "Skin." The 2,095 words of the story appear as tattoos on volunteers, and the story can only be read when the people come together as a group. Her novel HALF LIFE is more conventional in some regards (it is bound and can be purchased at a book store), but Jackson’s complex dualities of body/identity and self/other remain. HALF LIFE’s protagonist, Nora, lives in a surreal city where she works as a phone-sex operator. Nora’s conjoined twin, Blanche, has been asleep for 15 years, but as she wakes, Nora’s own identity begins to mutate and shift. Though rich in formal, intellectual, and theoretical elements, it is HALF LIFE’s driving humanity that makes this such a wonderful novel.

Aside from her short story, "The Lottery", "The Haunting of Hill House" is probably Shirley Jackson's most famous work. Dr. Montague is a scholar of the occult, looking for evidence of haunting. He has recruited three volunteers to spend a summer investigating the paranormal phenomena at Hill House. Only Eleanor, a lonely young women all too well acquainted with poltergeists, strikes a peculiar affinity with Hill House, one that may well prove dangerous...

Organized by theme rather than by timeline, this biography explores the influences in C. S. Lewis's life--from the colorful fantasies he spun as a child with his older brother Warnie to his association with the Inklings literary group--that led him to create his most famous work, the magical seven-book children's series the Chronicles of Narnia.