Pepper Street is a really nice, safe California neighborhood. The houses are tidy and the lawns are neatly mowed. Of course, the country club is close by, and lots of pleasant folks live there. The only problem is they knocked down the wall at the end of the street to make way for a road to a new housing development. Now, that's not good--it's just not good at all. Satirically exploring what happens when a smug suburban neighborhood is breached by awful, unavoidable truths, " The Road Through the Wall" is the tale that launched Shirley Jackson's heralded career.

A genius of literary suspense, known to millions as the author of the "The Lottery", Shirley Jackson (1916-1965) plumbed the cultural anxiety of postwar America better than anyone. Based on a wealth of previously undiscovered correspondence and dozens of interviews, Shirley Jackson reveals the tumultuous life and inner darkness of the author, firmly placing Jackson within the American Gothic tradition.

What is the difference between writing a novel about the Holocaust and fabricating a memoir? Do narratives about the Holocaust have a special obligation to be "truthful" - i.e., faithful to the facts of history? Or, in other words, when is it okay to lie about the Holocaust? In her provocative study A Thousand Darknesses: Truth and Lies In Holocaust Fiction , Ruth Franklin investigates these questions as they arise in the most significant works of fiction about the Holocaust, from Tadeusz Borowski's Auschwitz stories to Jonathan Safran Foer's postmodernist family history. Franklin argues that the memory-obsessed culture of the last few decades has led to a mistaken focus on testimony as the primary form of writing about the Holocaust. As even the most canonical Holocaust texts have come under scrutiny for their fidelity to the facts, we have lost sight of the essential role that imagination plays in the creation of any literary work, including - perhaps especially - the memoir. Taking a fresh look at memoirs by Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi, and examining novels by writers such as Piotr Rawicz, Jerzy Kosinski, W.G. Sebald, and Wolfgang Koeppen, Franklin makes a persuasive case for literature as an equally vital vehicle for understanding the Holocaust. The result is a study of immense depth and range that offers a lucid view of an often cloudy field.