Shelley Jackson was born in the Philippines, raised in Berkeley, California, and currently lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband, her daughter, and a three–legged dog. She received a B.A. in art from Stanford University and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Brown University. She is the author of the short story collection The Melancholy of Anatomy, the novel Half Life, the hypertext novel Patchwork Girl, several children’s books, and “Skin,” a story published in tattoos on the skin of more than 2,000 volunteers. She teaches in the graduate writing program at The New School.
Praise for Riddance
Finalist for The Believer Book Award for Fiction
Named a Best Book of Fall by Vulture, New York Magazine, and
more
"A ravishing novel charged with the idea of the incommunicable."
—The New Yorker
"Polyphonic." — New York
"The wildly creative Jackson . . . spins a fragmented, Gothic
murder mystery." —Los Angeles Times
"Jackson’s book is a brainy but ultimately tender mystery, spinning
around a fascinatingly deluded headmistress who thinks stuttering
children can channel the dead; one of her star student–cultists,
and the question of who offed a very unlucky school inspector."
—Vulture
"At once a handbook for speaking to the dead, a harrowing,
propellant story of greed and ambition, and a commonplace book of
spiritualist apocrypha. Riddance should have been the talk of the
book world, and of the supernatural world, when it came out; the
living and the dead must correct this error at once." —Katharine
Coldiron, The Rumpus
"Jackson’s experimental frame of poetic prose, documentation, and
photographs, which describe the minutiae of how her characters
experience the world around them, is carefully wrought, showing a
deep love of language, both for herself and the world she’s
created." —Jenee Skinner, The Arkansas International
"Unsettling in the best way, Riddance is a lush, gothic novel . . .
Spooky old sepia–toned photos and diagrams accompany an academic’s
notes in this compelling ghost story."" —Maris Kreizman, The
Cut
"Immersive and deliciously haunting, this is a novel that cannot be
read without being deeply felt. Like the disembodied voices
conjured by the 'hearing–mouth children' who attend Sybil Joines'
Vocational School, Jackson's fictive vision will challenge you and
make you examine language's power as well as its potential to heal
and cause harm." —Shondaland
Spine–tingling. —Bustle
"Where to begin with Riddance . . . ? An exhumation of
influences—19th century spiritualism, Moby–Dick, Jane Eyre, Dennis
Cooper, H.P. Lovecraft—would be a start, but it wouldn’t do justice
to the author’s incomparable inventiveness . . . It’s a totally
unique achievement, coincident with Jackson’s status as a writer of
the postmodern weird, but not dependent on it . . . Riddance
enthralls and engages." —Popscure
"In Shelley Jackson’s Riddance, ghosts speak in the space between
sounds in a child’s stutter. The mouth is the entrance and exit to
the land of the dead; words and even objects from beyond the veil
populate the boarding school where the children hone their
abilities . . . The novel’s language [is] alluring [and] reflects
the unknown that lies beyond, around and within us." —Paste
"Shelley Jackson’s illuminated novel delivers an original tale that
will make you realize you’re closer to ghosts than you once
believed." —Frannie Jackson, Paste
"Every once in a while a book comes along that merits special
attention. Shelley Jackson’s Riddance; or, The Sybil Joines
Vocational School for Ghost Speakers and Hearing–Mouth Children is
one of those books. It’s masterfully written, wildly entertaining,
incredibly clever, and a creepily thrilling good read . . . That
Jackson is a master of her craft should come as no news to anyone
familiar with her work but what she has done in this new novel is
create a premise as original as any in modern fiction and
characters as memorable as any of those referenced in the novel
(Jane Eyre and Ishmael among others). The novel’s meditations on
life after death or death within life, or life as death, will leave
you haunted and questioning the very nature of human existence."
—The Brooklyn Rail
"The works of Shelley Jackson frequently head beyond the surreal
and into something uncategorizable and phantasmagorical. With this,
her first novel in twelve years, Jackson tells the story of
students at a school for those with speech impediments, who are
utilized in a plan to contact the dead. We are suitably intrigued."
—Vol. 1 Brooklyn
"Riddance is Jackson’s first novel in twelve years, and it’s as
noisy, category–defying, and fantastically weird a book as a
longtime Jackson fan might hope for . . . It is a big, exuberant,
gleeful book, whimsical and inventive and stuffed full of wild
leaps from the land of the dead to the land of the living—which, in
Jackson’s world, are not so very separate at all." —Tor.com
"Riddance is a physical artifact, a material object you need to
hold in your hands to fully understand. Riddance defies the
existing categories we have for understanding what writing is so
Jackson can make space for a new argument about what writing can do
. . . Reading Riddance is an experience in being haunted, not by
ghosts per se, but by the growing sense that writing itself is a
haunted enterprise. Riddance is haunted by undead histories, undead
traumas, undead authors, and undead words that were never really
our own, that illuminate why a book is not only written, but made.
The parts may be undead, but Shelley Jackson has assembled them,
made them through her writing, all come to life again." —Erin
Bartnett, Electric Literature
"Sit down with a cup of tea, or maybe something stronger, and get
ready to shiver delightfully as you learn about a headmistress
obsessed with 'necrophysics.' Sybil Joines believes she can take
children with speech impediments and teach them to communicate with
the dead. Her story alone would make an excellent tale, but Jackson
(Half Life) and designer Zachary Thomas Dodson have expanded it
with facsimiles for each document that dial up the supernatural
feel . . . A ghost story, a mystery, a manifesto, a work of
art—Riddance is all of these at once." —Bethanne Patrick, Literary
Hub
"Both Half Life and Riddance show Shelley Jackson to be a poised
and evocative stylist, one of the reasons both of these quite long
books remain pleasurable to read." —Daniel Green, Full Stop
"This clever, cacophonous novel of metaphysical gothic from Jackson
(Half Life) teems with voices of the living and the dead . . . Full
of Carrollian logic and whimsical grotesquerie, the tale . . . is
an illuminating allegory of fiction writing, for 'the necrocosmos
is made of language; we precipitate a world with every word we
speak.' Joines is a remarkable creation in a wonderful book—an
imperious, otherworldly, and damaged figure who, haunted by her
childhood, devises and devotes her life to a haunted philosophy."
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Not only an incredible yarn but a delightfully strange, wondrously
original, and dazzlingly immersive gothic love letter to
storytelling." —Booklist
“Shelley Jackson is a writer of such extraordinary, uncanny power
that the hair on the back of my neck stands up when I encounter her
work. What an exhilarating, prickling, blistering book Riddance is!
I made myself read it as slowly as possible in order to stay in as
long as I could.”—Kelly Link, author of Get in Trouble: Stories
"Wow! Riddance is an extraordinarily inventive, spooky,
fascinating, surprising book. On one level a mash–up of Moby–Dick
and Jane Eyre; on another, an intricate literary puzzle; and at
heart, a poignant investigation of what happens when we try to make
the world a better place. It simply amazed me."" —Allegra Huston,
author of Say My Name and Love Child: A Memoir of Family Lost and
Found
"Thomas Edison considered building a device to speak with the dead.
A century later, Shelley Jackson has. This book is a ghost portal.
It is also a genius work of art; a lost history; a rollicking,
wondrous, Borgesian library; and a haunting so gloriously
conceived, reader, you will shudder.""—Samantha Hunt, PEN/Faulkner
finalist for The Dark Dark
"Riddance is a book like no other, a murder mystery channeled back
from the next life, in conversation with the great authors and
characters of the 1800s—Melville, the Brontës, Bartleby, and Jane
Eyre. Shelley Jackson has created the book I have dreamt of, a book
that does not contain magic, but that is actually magic. A story
that spans the divide separating the living and the dead, but that
proposes death not as static but adventure. When my time comes, I
hope—like her heroine Sybil—to be a necronaut."—Darcey Steinke,
author of Sister Golden Hair
"You never know what Shelley Jackson is going to do next—you just
know it will be something brilliant." —Tom McCarthy, author of
Satin Island, short–listed for the 2015 Man Booker Prize
"A terrific piece of tragicomic fiction. Ostensibly about a 1919
murder at a vocational school for stammerers in Massachusetts, a
school that doubles as a kind of spiritualism lab—young stammerers
thought to be particularly adept at communicating with the dead—but
more centrally about time and death, familiar targets of most
fictionists, especially those of the crepuscular sort. Jackson
herself channels a multitude of famous dead authors from Charlotte
Brontë to Samuel Beckett, producing a metafictional style that is
witty, imaginative, rich with stunning metaphors, and often
playfully profound. The many asides—such as the 'Documentarian of
the Dead,' the forays into Principles of Necrophysics, the amazing
stage show near the end of the novel—very nearly match the power of
the central narrative, carried by the school’s headmistress and her
stenographer, but their stories do indeed provide the harrowing
climax. The book has been brilliantly produced by Black Balloon
Publishing." —Robert Coover, author of Huck Out West
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