Susan Scarf Merrell Author Event

Susan Scarf Merrell Author Event

We are pleased to welcome novelist Susan Scarf Merrell to the store for a presentation and discussion of her latest work, Shirley, a meticulously researched book based on the journals and writings of Shirley Jackson and her husband, Stanley Hyman. Susan will join us on Thursday, July 24th from 6:00 to 7:00 p.m. This is a free wine and cheese event and reservations are requested.  For more information, please contact us at 231.347.1180 or send us an email

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Two imposing literary figures are at the center of Susan Scarf Merrell’s suspenseful new novel, Shirley. The celebrated Shirley Jackson, best known for her short story “The Lottery,” and her husband, Stanley Edgar Hyman, a literary critic and professor at Bennington College, made a fascinating, commanding couple in their day. Brilliant, flamboyant, and proudly unconventional, they cast an almost magnetic spell of intellectual grandeur.

A young couple, Fred and Rose Nemser, a graduate student and his pregnant wife, move into Shirley and Stanley’s home on the Bennington campus in the summer of 1964. With her husband teaching all day, Rose forms an unlikely, turbulent friendship with the troubled and unpredictable Shirley. Intrigued by the Hymans’ tempestuous marriage and inexplicably drawn to the darkly witty author, Rose nonetheless senses something amiss—something to do with nightly unanswered phone calls and inscrutable accounts of a long-missing female student. For fans of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? and Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, Shirley is a compelling, elegant thriller written in homage to Jackson’s own classic horror stories.

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Susan Scarf Merrell is the author of a previous novel, A Member of the Family, and a nonfiction work, The Accidental Bond: How Sibling Connections Influence Adult Relationships. She teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing & Literature at Stony Brook Southampton and is Fiction Editor of TSR: The Southampton Review.

Event date: 
Thursday, July 24, 2014 - 6:00pm to 7:00pm
Event address: 
307 E Lake St.
49770 Petoskey
us