«Here’s how not to be taken seriously as a woman writer: Use demons and ghosts and other gothic paraphernalia in your fiction. Describe yourself publicly as “a practicing amateur witch” and boast about the hexes you have placed on prominent publishers. Contribute comic essays to women’s magazines about your hectic life as a housewife and mother. Shirley Jackson did all of these things, and, during her lifetime, was largely dismissed as a talented purveyor of high-toned horror stories—“Virginia Werewoolf,” as one critic put it. For most of the fifty-one years since her death, that reputation has stuck. Today, “The Lottery,” her story of ritual human sacrifice in a New England village ( first published in this magazine, in 1948 ), has become a staple of eighth-grade reading lists» ➀

This 6-page editorial design, accompanied by a cover, offers a new perspective on Shirley Jackson’s iconic short story The Lottery. Set in a small New England village, the story revolves around an annual ritual in which townspeople draw slips of paper from a box, with the unfortunate “winner” marked by a dot. The design highlights two key elements of the story: the alphabetical list of neighbors’ names who participate, and the symbolic dot that determines the fateful outcome.

Based on these two concepts, the editorial adopts an aesthetic that mimics the layout of a dictionary – the quintessential book that presents its content in an alphabetically ordered list. It incorporates features such as column dividers, first-line indents, bolded names, and white spaces for images or illustrations. As for the dot, a modification is made to the font used ( Times Now ), removing all the dots present in the glyphs. Throughout the editorial, there will be a count of the dots removed, culminating in a single, definitive dot at the end of the book, mirroring the short story’s conclusion.

On the cover, all the dots that were removed from the text ( 1,137 dots ) are arranged semi-randomly to form the title “The Lottery”.

( References )

➀ Zoë Heller ( 2016 ). The Haunted Mind of Shirley Jackson.
[ online ] The New Yorker.