Shirley Jackson, department store clerk.

The New England Historical Society writes about Shirley Jackson's short stint as a worker at Macy's (which includes a link to Jackson's short story "My Life with R.H. Macy").

Foxwell ebooks sale.

Get 25% off my two ebooks until January 1 with the sale at Smashwords. No Man's Land & Other Stories collects my mostly historical mystery stories (including two award winners); In Their Own Words offers first-person accounts by US women who served in World War I. 

Second Oddest Book Title Award for McFarland.

For the second year in a row, McFarland has nabbed the Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title administered by The Bookseller with RuPedagogies of Realness: Essays on Teaching and Learning with RuPaul’s Drag Race, edited by Lindsay Bryde and Tommy Mayberry. Last year's winner was Is Superman Circumcised? The Complete Jewish History of the World's Greatest Hero by Roy Schwartz.

Lady Audley in the dock.

As the Law and Humanities blog mentions, Robert E. Rains (Penn State Dickinson Law) discusses in a new article the many crimes of Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley of Lady Audley's Secret (1862) from a legal perspective. The charges that he believes "a crusading prosecutor might have leveled against Lady A" include arson, attempted murder, bigamy, and manslaughter, and he criticizes the "rather slow" and "lazy" barrister Sir Robert Audley.