Hangsaman 
The Sunday afternoon cocktail party, to which Arnold Waite has invited his literary friends and neighbors, serves to etch in the details of this family's life, and to draw Natalie into the vortex. The story concentrates on the next few critical months in Natalie's life, away at college, where each experience reproduces on a larger scale the crucial failure of her emotional life at home. With a mounting tension rising from character and situation as well as the particular magic of which Miss Jackson is master, the novel proceeds inexorably to the stinging melodrama of its conclusion. The bitter cruelty of the passage from adolescence to womanhood, of a sensitive and lonely girl caught in a world not of her own devising, is a theme well suited to Miss Jackson's brilliant talent.
"It then became perfectly clear to her that this was the reasonable consequence of all her life, from the beginning until now. She had done so much to preserve herself from this kind of captivity and had taken inevitably one of the many roads which would lead her to the same torment; she was helpless among people who hated her and showed it by holding her motionless until they would choose to release her. .I was very curious about Jacksons early novels that have been brought back into print in
Hangsaman, for me at least, is one of those books that, after you finish reading, you have to look to an external source to tell you what the hell you have just read. I'm still not sure. For awhile I wasn't even sure if one of the characters, Tony, was real.It may not capture the reader to the extent that We have Always Lived in the Castle, but one cannot help but be drawn into Natalie's world of paranoia. Shirley Jackson's characters are spellbinding even if their journeys are not always.

Ivan wrote: "That description makes me want to read the book."Anything by Shirley Jackson is goood!
Enjoyable, weird, eerie, creepy, disjointed, dreamlike, fantastical. No more words.
Hangsaman is a strange novel by any standards; as if trying to remember a dream I feel the urge to write this blog quickly as I can, before its unique internal logic fades from my mind. Its central character is Natalie Whaite, a seventeen-year old American girl on the verge of going to college. The surface level events of the story are mundane, trite even: Natalie has bourgeois parents, and goes to a respectable girls-only college. But what happens externally is not really the point; this is a
Edit: This was not a an actual review, but a very emotional and troubled response to what was an experience rather than a proper reading. I felt this book viscerally more than just read it. I wish I'd kept at distance from it so I could have appreciated it more. I've read a couple of reviews that made me appreciate it better, and I'm thankful for that. My perspective on it is definitely skewed, so you really shouldn't base your decision on it to decide whether you should read this novel or not.
Shirley Jackson
Hardcover | Pages: 191 pages Rating: 3.74 | 3453 Users | 442 Reviews

Point Books Toward Hangsaman
Original Title: | Hangsaman |
ISBN: | 0445031174 (ISBN13: 9780445031173) |
Relation As Books Hangsaman
HANGSAMAN is Miss Jackson's second novel. The story is a simple one but the overtones are immediately present. "Natalie Waite who was seventeen years old but who felt that she had been truly conscious only since she was about fifteen lived in an odd corner of a world of sound and sight, past the daily voices of her father and mother and their incomprehensible actions." In a few graphic pages, the family is before us—Arnold Waite, a writer, egotistical and embittered; his wife, the complaining martyr; Bud, the younger brother who has not yet felt the need to establish his independence; and Natalie, in the nightmare of being seventeen.The Sunday afternoon cocktail party, to which Arnold Waite has invited his literary friends and neighbors, serves to etch in the details of this family's life, and to draw Natalie into the vortex. The story concentrates on the next few critical months in Natalie's life, away at college, where each experience reproduces on a larger scale the crucial failure of her emotional life at home. With a mounting tension rising from character and situation as well as the particular magic of which Miss Jackson is master, the novel proceeds inexorably to the stinging melodrama of its conclusion. The bitter cruelty of the passage from adolescence to womanhood, of a sensitive and lonely girl caught in a world not of her own devising, is a theme well suited to Miss Jackson's brilliant talent.
Be Specific About Epithetical Books Hangsaman
Title | : | Hangsaman |
Author | : | Shirley Jackson |
Book Format | : | Hardcover |
Book Edition | : | First Edition |
Pages | : | Pages: 191 pages |
Published | : | 1976 (first published 1951) |
Categories | : | Fiction. Horror. Classics. Gothic. Novels |
Rating Epithetical Books Hangsaman
Ratings: 3.74 From 3453 Users | 442 ReviewsCrit Epithetical Books Hangsaman
★★★★✰ 4 starsDearest dearest darling most important dearest darling Nataliethis is me talking, your own priceless own Natalie.Alice in Wonderland meets The Bell Jar in Jackson's much overlooked Hangsaman.The first time I read this I felt confused. Although Jackson demonstrates her usual sharp humour and rhythmic writing style, the story seemed far less structured than her other novels. A second reading however made me much more appreciative of this weird anti-bildungsroman. What I previously"It then became perfectly clear to her that this was the reasonable consequence of all her life, from the beginning until now. She had done so much to preserve herself from this kind of captivity and had taken inevitably one of the many roads which would lead her to the same torment; she was helpless among people who hated her and showed it by holding her motionless until they would choose to release her. .I was very curious about Jacksons early novels that have been brought back into print in
Hangsaman, for me at least, is one of those books that, after you finish reading, you have to look to an external source to tell you what the hell you have just read. I'm still not sure. For awhile I wasn't even sure if one of the characters, Tony, was real.It may not capture the reader to the extent that We have Always Lived in the Castle, but one cannot help but be drawn into Natalie's world of paranoia. Shirley Jackson's characters are spellbinding even if their journeys are not always.

Ivan wrote: "That description makes me want to read the book."Anything by Shirley Jackson is goood!
Enjoyable, weird, eerie, creepy, disjointed, dreamlike, fantastical. No more words.
Hangsaman is a strange novel by any standards; as if trying to remember a dream I feel the urge to write this blog quickly as I can, before its unique internal logic fades from my mind. Its central character is Natalie Whaite, a seventeen-year old American girl on the verge of going to college. The surface level events of the story are mundane, trite even: Natalie has bourgeois parents, and goes to a respectable girls-only college. But what happens externally is not really the point; this is a
Edit: This was not a an actual review, but a very emotional and troubled response to what was an experience rather than a proper reading. I felt this book viscerally more than just read it. I wish I'd kept at distance from it so I could have appreciated it more. I've read a couple of reviews that made me appreciate it better, and I'm thankful for that. My perspective on it is definitely skewed, so you really shouldn't base your decision on it to decide whether you should read this novel or not.
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