Flannery O'Connor Books

David Crouse's Copy Cats is a book of fictional short stories revolving around characters that are on the fringes of society searching for their sense of self and struggling with truth and lies. Crouse's characters are unable to cope with reality, so they fabricate stories (or lies) to make their lives meaningful and justify their own actions. The structures of the stories are all a kind of twisted irony. The truth and reality the characters live in are presented very simply. By the end the reader is either extremely confused or distraught at the happenings of the story, or a mix of both. And yet, through all the darkness, confusion and irony, the reader is drawn to the beauty of the writing and the almost intimate, personal window given to the reader through his style of writing, allowing the reader to catch a glimpse of the struggle these characters endure.

Crouse writes modern tales in a modern world. His story Click, a novella, is filled with conflict, longing, tension building up to a slap in the face of reality. If you bought the book for this story alone you will come away feeling satisfied with the overall product. Crouse is an excellent writer that tells a great story.

The characters are dark and foreboding, with good intentions through every situation Crouse's protagonists deal with. The plots are cutting but believable. It is as if you were listening to a friend telling you a supremely odd tale tempting you to cry out, "No Way!" right in the middle of them. Stranger things do happen in the real world, and when they occur they are the things one talks about over and over again amongst friends and at gatherings.

I highly recommend this book.

This is an incredible collection of short stories, deserving of the Flannery O'Connor award. Buy it, it's wonderful!

The kind of book I love to savor, but can't put down. Every single story is a treat, with unforgettable characters that want to stay longer than you wish.

I think of that line, taken from a Silver Jews song, because it describes this book fully. These are real people--fringe, or whatever you want to call them. There is something true about this book that some people may not want to admit. The sometimes broken nature of our selves that plays out in unsuspected ways runs rampant through these stories--they are stories about here, about now. Buy this, you need it.

Also, look for a fun little story by Crouse in the Dark Horse Book of the Dead.

How sweet the sound that saved this wreched human race. O'Connor writes of God's love and redemption of humanity. She uses exaggeration to make her point. Her characters are so very silly, obtuse, bigoted, loathsome they become cartoons, yet there is a deep integrity to their shallowness. She's not making fun of them, but giving them the justice of a pitiless description. Indeed they do not seem judged, but naked -- the fruits of their stupid, misguided ideas and actions on display. And these children of God do shocking things to others and themselves. And yet . . ..

And yet God allows them to live and learn, or not learn if that is their inclination. He gives them this freedom. He loves them. How can this be? How?

I love O'Connor for her art, her convictions, her courage, and her love. She is so very true and honest.

In addition to her novels and a thorough selection of short stories, there is a chronology of her life and a selection of her letters which are rewarding reading. The book itself is a wonderful object. The pages are of fine paper. The binding is such that you can lay it open on a table without breaking its back, and the pages will not move unless a breeze or you do so.

Now that I've read everything by O'Connor (including works that were part of her thesis for her degree in writing) I am still amazed and inspired by her work. I'm not from the south or Catholic and I was not alive during the eras of which she wrote, but her writing transcends region and time. My favorites remain A Good Man is Hard to Find, Everything That Rises Must Converge, and Revelation, but I love all her stories, although I find the novels a bit more challenging - I think short story was her finest form. Her ability to mix desperation and violence with comedy is amazing, and often when I read her I think: "I shouldn't be laughing at that." I often wonder what additional work she would have produced if she had not died so young. Highly recommended.

I am thoroughly enjoying this authoritative collection of O'Connor's writings. The writing speaks for itself as truly great and unique. This particular book is very classy and well put together; an excellent choice for someone with a significant interest in O'Connor.

The complaints about the poor organization of the collection can be overcome by simply reading it from front to back. Surely it is that good.

My foray into the works of Flannery O'Connor, a southern, gothic author of darkly humorous novels and short stories came via a recommendation in Harold Bloom's, "What to Read and Why." As it turned ot, I had read one of her short stories, "A Good Man is Hard to Find," in a collection somewhere and had been surprised and shocked, by the turn of events and ending of the story, so much so, that I remembered it instantly, even though it has to have been thirty years since I read it. I enjoyed everything, short stories, novellas, and even her letters. She writes about southern Christ-haunted people, most backward, all damned, but many redeemed. Bloom says that according to her, we are all damned but one should put that aside and simply enjoy her beautiful, grotesque, and wonderful comedic stories. Her protagonist is often a woman, forced to take on a role and duties she didn't sign up for but resignedly and with no illusions playing and discharging both out of a sense of morality or necessity; those women are usually the most superior beings in her stories.

Many of her insights stick with me months afterwards. For example, O'Connor says in one of her letters, "...Hazel's integrity lies in his not being able to do so. Does one's integrity ever lie in what he is not able to do? I think that usually it does, for free will does not mean one will, but many wills conflicting in one man. Freedom cannot be conceived simply. It is a mystery and one which a novel, even a comic novel, can only be asked to deepen." That brought tears to my eyes -- perhaps because it is so beautifully put.

Oh yes! I adore her, and so do my mum and dad. They talk about her all of the time, and so I grew up with the prose ringing in my ears. I am so pleased to be reading her now.

My thirty-five-year-old copy of this book is worn to tatters, and not just because of O'Connor's killer sense of humor. When overwhelmed by it all, this book does the trick. These letters won't be what her readers expect. True, they are ironic, economical, vivid, and eccentric. But their eccentricity runs not to blood, evil, and delusions; it runs to peacock farming. And--although a few noted writers are correspondents-- O'Connor mainly recounts the daily routines: setting the table, collecting the mail, entertaining the neighbors, reading the latest book. But seen through her eyes, these events are page-turners. Meanwhile, without one grain of saccharine, she conveys her acceptance, contentment, and steely dedication to writing while crippled with lupus (which killed her before she was forty.) But no bitterness here. Not only do you get absorbed in the writing; your own problems become trivial. By the way, aside from being one of the best writers I've ever read, she may also be the most authentically southern. By this I don't mean she's from the south. I mean she nails southern speech without ever resorting to embarassing attempts at "dialect."
If you're from the south too, you'll know what I mean.

This book is wonderful. If you're interested in O'Connor, you should definitely read it. AND, if you're NOT interested in O'Connor, this will make you interested in her. This book gives meaning to all her other stories.

I thought the title, "The Habit of Being" was extremely strange. But as you read it, it becomes very clear why a) it was titled that and b) O'Connor exemplified that motto.

Throughout this book you will see a thoughtful, kind, and analytical artist love on her work and her friends--in the most natural, uninhibited way. She spells words wrong. She speaks of her failing health. She talks about life on the farm. In the next letter it'll be theology and Aristotle though. It's beautiful and you will learn a lot from it.

That said...it's almost 600 pages long. BUT, I couldn't put it down.

She's witty and extremely funny too.

One of her best friends complied this set of letters to share the real Flannery with the public. That she did, and it is a blessing indeed.

is like the impact of violence," Flannery O'Connor once wrote, which doesn't explain her stories but does help illuminate them. Having read her short stories and seen the cult film of Wise Blood, I nevertheless approached her letters gingerly. However, they hail from a time and tradition when letter writing was not only an art but a means of expression and communication. She works out a lot of the ideas she's writing about in her letters, which makes reading the finished works that much more fascinating.

O'Connor raised peacocks and lived on a farm in Georgia, but she also had lupus, an incurable disease. She's not sentimental about it (or about most things); she'd be a candidate for a Catholic realist (if there is such a category). Almost any writer or reader will find these letters fascinating for what they reveal about O'Connor and her method of working. Almost any spiritually-minded reader will find them equally intriguing for her insights on the human condition. Because Protestants don't have sacraments (Catholics have seven sacraments, Protestants have two), she once suggested, they have to make everything up as they go along. That seems to me to be the case in some post-modern churches where, it would seem, anything goes. But it would be incorrect, as Ralph Wood shows in Flannery O'Connor and the Christ-haunted South, to think she therefore held the fundamentalists who people her books in disdain, as did liberal Protestants and much of society in her time. Her generous nature is one reason so many are returning to reading O'Connor, and so many new readers are discovering her.

These letters offer deep insight into the importance of the Catholic faith to Flannery O'Connor and to her audience of a number of decades ago. I found it an important book for today as well because we are still breathing in the toxic gas of nihilism. Not only did I enjoy her writings, but I found them to be exceptional well constructed.

Flannery O'Connor's correspondence is a fine testimony to humor, faith, and work in the life of a fascinating and absolutely unswerving human being. As she says in a letter to Andrew Lytle from this collection, the fact that she was a Catholic kept her from being a regional writer and the fact that she was a Southerner kept her from being a Catholic writer. If you want the best tutorial you're apt to ever read on how to write fiction, forget the usual "Write a Novel in 30 Days" garbage and get a copy of THE HABIT OF BEING. She'll also teach you quite a bit about living.

Flannery O'Connor has offered a challenging call for Christian artists to be good at what they do. She has reminded the church that beauty, the senses, and art must not be neglected.

Before reading this book, I never thought about the grandeur of peacocks and pea chickens this way. As a matter of fact, I do not believe I had ever thought about the royal pea chicken. Most of this book is really entertaining, although some is a little heavy-handed. If you are at all interested in the thought process of Flannery O'Connor, read this book

This is a wonderful compilation of essays, speeches and musings by Flannery O'Connor, one of America's finest short story writers. If you have read O'Connor's stories, then this is an essential companion to her stories, because it reveals O'Connor's vision of the South, the grotesque, religion, other writers and the meaning and purpose of fiction. This book also contains some of the most succinct and lucid essays about the art and craft of writing. In sum, this is a superb book that, with the passage time, is timeless.

I haven't read anything by Flannery O'Connor since "All Things That Rise Must Converge." I fell in love with her stories. There is so much life in them. I read this work to get an idea about her "sitz im leben", her life-situation, her milieu. A lot of it is correspondence, and there are some presentations as well. I am wondering if it speaks to the modern would-be novelist as much as it spoke to writers of her time and place. She says that one needs to write out of the context of where you are: the place, the people, the geography. This is mandatory, not optional.

This book is for writers. I appreciate her writing about how to be Catholic in the South, a very small minority. She has contributed much to finding faith in the stories of life, even violent and brutal stories. I look forward to my next work of hers.

The recurrent subject in this first-rate collection of essays and occasional pieces is the business of writing. O'Connor was scrupulous in her insistence that the writer begin with the humblest of materials, the sights, sounds and smells of the concrete world. She found unreadable, apparently, those writers who had nothing to offer but one abstract psychological insight after another. At the same time she recognized that writers skilled only in giving the world's body a fond description would never transcend mere competence. And of writers merely competent, she asserted that there was in her time a glut. What distinguished the writer of the first rank, always a rare bird, she maintained, was vision, vision of a sort, allied with the aforementioned competence, that enabled such a writer to reveal through concrete events something of the mystery of our existence and experience on this odd planet. Such vision, she consistently held, was a gift that could not be learned in creative writing classes. Therefore, when asked if she thought such classes for writers stifled many talented practitioners, she quipped in her memorable style that such classes, unfortunately, "didn't stifle enough of them."

The book was in great condition and was sent very quickly; thank you.

The combination of memorable characters, quirky situations, and beautiful prose makes this book a true winner. I've been recommending it to everyone I know who loves short fiction. These stories of people moving forward through their lives or gripped by inertia are heartfelt, sad, and hilarious. The writing is poetic, very visual, almost cinematic: I'm sure Hollywood is going to pick up some options on a couple of these stories. It's a treat to read such good fiction.

This is such a great book! It's a new collection of short stories from the winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for short fiction. And it's funny - I'd be reading along and then come to a passage or sentence that was so funny I'd laugh out loud - and really, how often does that happen? One of the things that's special about the book is that the characters are really different from story to story. They, and the situations they create for themselves, are truly fresh and original. Short stories are the new, hot thing and I'm glad they're being rediscovered. All my friends are getting this book for Christmas!

The first time you read these short stories, you may find yourself missing subway stops or receiving curious glances from fellow commuters as you try to suppress your smiles and outright laughter. On a second reading - and these stories will repay multiple readings - you become aware of the craftsmanship of Sutton's writing. Sutton is not just an excellent stylist , but a stylist whose prose serves her message. The hard clarity of her writing is the perfect vehicle for the tough and unsentimental tone of these stories. Whether in the jaundiced observations of a divinity school employee sent to pump a donation out of a dying woman ("The Rest of Esther"), or the evocation of an emotionally fraught romantic triangle ("Risk Merchants"), Sutton's blend of spare eloquence and "tough guy" pose recalls Martin Amis more than any contemporary American woman.

This is another great book from Bill Roorbach adding to his SUMMERS WITH JULIET and WRITING LIFE STORIES. Roorbach writes with masculine vigor without being macho. His empathy for the elderly equals his concern for normal people with lonely hearts. He is a romantic through and through. After reading BIG BEND, you want to read everything this brilliant and sympathetic author puts out. Read this and watch for more.

This is another great book from Bill Roorbach adding to his SUMMERS WITH JULIET and WRITING LIFE STORIES. Roorbach writes with masculine vigor without being macho. His empathy for the elderly equals his concern for normal people with lonely hearts. He is a romantic through and through. After reading BIG BEND, you want to read everything this brilliant and sympathetic author puts out. Read this and watch for more.

I read this wonderful collection of stories with a sense of absolute delight. Bill Roorbach knows the secret desires in the hearts of all his befuddled, passionate men. In "Fog," he enters the world of a boy's first romantic love and makes it surprising and new, erotic and terrifying, thrilling and funny: "Then she wanted to know how it felt and I wanted to know how she felt and we said tingling and bursting, the same for both of us, almost hurtful, and she said, 'Love you.' Which I tried to say, too, but it came out just like the vowel sounds in English class." The remarkable "Taughannock Falls" has the sweep and complexity of a full novel, though it fills only thirteen pages. Two middle-aged men, estranged since one married the other's girlfriend twenty years earlier, re-enter each other's lives under extraordinary circumstances: Stephen has fallen into a mysterious catatonic state, and Bob believes he might be the only one with enough knowledge, love, anger, and desire to pull him out again. "Not a movement from my old friend. Not a blink of the eye, not a nod of the head, not a tear on the cheek, not a tap of the foot, not a twitch of the lip. He looks tremendous--healthy and wise, clean and brave, courteous and kind." When Stephen finally snaps open, he is a bursting boy, delivered not into the present, not into his handsome, forty-five-year-old body--but tossed backward into the life he left in his twenties, into a time when no love surpasses the manic joy he feels with his friend "Bobbo." What amazes me about all the stories in this collection is Bill Roorbach's vision of grace. There's a fast heat on the surface of every tale, a love of language that is playful and exact. The levity, the crisp dialogue, the sharp sting of interior revelation, all serve as counterpoints to quiet explorations of mercy and forgiveness, tenderness and compassion. The title piece is a tour de force that pushes Bill Roorbach's enormous talents as a storyteller to their limits. Dennis Hunter--wealthy, widowed, seventy-four years old and still bound by love to his wife Betty--is an unlikely candidate for a job with the United States Forest Service that pays just above minimum wage. And he's an even more unlikely candidate for a troubling, giddy, unavoidable attachment to a married woman in her forties who watches birds and weighs as much as he does. But Mr. Roorbach is a writer who knows and celebrates love at every age, in every marvelous incarnation. These two will swim the River of Ghosts to make love in Mexico where Martha believes she won't be breaking a parting promise to her husband, a vow "not to mess around with any man in Texas." This isn't an easy moment physically or spritually, and Dennis Hunter, besieged by desire, never lets us forget the moral complexities, the fear, or the wonder. "She was forty-seven and married and standing waist deep and naked in the Rio Grande not twenty feet from Mexico. Dennis felt her gaze . . . and followed Martha, climbed in the river after her . . . he was being swept away in the current, pictured himself washed up on a flat rock dead and naked miles downstream. But Martha got hold of his hand laughing and they stood waist deep together in the stream rushing past, silty, sweetly warm water." This collection is pure pleasure for all the senses, a balm for the spirit, an immersion in a world where passion is the greatest risk and love the only certain path to rapture and redemption.

Following the weird but vaguely sensible logic of a dream, a teacher finds his school's field trip buses redirected to his father's house, where he grew up.

Once there, the father presents the son's life in a dry slide show. The son rushes from room to room, encountering memories and blocked escapes. A mother and a former lover that he pleads with to hide so that no one should see them. That his lives, past and present, should remain segregated.

And throughout, despite his attempts to put clothes on, the son finds himself naked.

Field Trip, a story from Greg Downs' collection Spit Baths, paints the haunting hopelessness of the great Southern exodus -- the withered roots that never quite break from a region that's all but died. And the guilt that always hangs with the accumulating weight of generations. Each story aches with the same pains.

They flow into each other, each one an expansion on the same themes. The blending of stories is subtle, rich, and connected by the universal string of the past. The prose throughout has a Southern informality to it, making an accessible and enjoyable read which still manages to glimmer with fluid and evocative observation. Cans twang in impacts against the ground, a girl's skin coats her lover's tongue with dried sweat. It all has the familiar, dry, dead beauty of a preserved antebellum house, with furnished rooms all coated in dust.

Spit Baths is a subtle but stunning achievement. A must-read for all Southerners, both resident and expatriate - Greg Downs has given us as grand a eulogy as any for our lost homeland, but tucked it quietly into the obituary page of a small town newspaper.

I am generally not into this genre of fiction, but, a reading group that I follow picked the book up and I decided I would try it out. I'm glad I did. Greg has an uncanny ability to get deep into his characters with what seems like minimal effort and smooth transition.
I'm looking forward to his future work.

I thoroughly enjoyed these stories. Downs characters have a very unique view of the world they inhabit. Their pasts weigh heavy on them as they struggle or push themselves to move forward in an ever changing world. Their take on events and often peculiar advice is refreshing, if somewhat bizarre. It's a good read.

The best word I can think of to describe this writing is punchy. Spencer artfully packs so much into quick and lovely sentences. His stories evoked much thought for me about his characters. I wasn't always sure I liked them (the characters), but they were always real. I'd definitely recommend this book.

No one writes with more pathos about modern life than Darrell Spencer. His characters are brave but muddled, and the troubles about which they must be brave are generally too absurd (the sign painter whose employee misspells "entertainment" and provokes a cranky Las Vegas mob boss, or the ex-Mormon jogger whose devout neighbor wants to pray for his hamstring in the temple) to find much comfort--or nobility--in their lives. What's remarkable about Spencer, though, is that he finds nobility in the mundane, mostly by giving voice to the perplexed Mormons (and faithless but still looking-for-faith Mormons), puzzled husbands, fabric store clerks, trailer park host, and deaf people who suffer, joke, and survive in these stories. If you like short stories, you absolutely must read "Late-Night TV" and "It's a Lot Scarier if You Take Jesus Out."

While O'Connor fans may be able to locate much of this material elsewhere, it's wonderful to have her thoughts on spiritual matters collected and arranged as they are in this book. Giannone's introduction is good reading, too.

Robert Ellsberg has come through again. He provides us with a marvelous review of the spiritual writings of Flannery O'Connor, most famous for her short stories but neglected, up until now, for her deep analyses of the Catholic faith and salvation.

Ellsberg selects the best from the voluminous collection of her letters, "The Habit of Being," and arranges them for accessibility and understanding in sections entitled "Christian Realism," "Mother and Teacher," "Revelation," "A Reason to Write," and "The Province of Joy."

Flannery didn't want to be a voice crying in the wilderness. She wanted to reach an unbelieving audience even though she bridled at being called a "Catholic writer." She preferred to be called "a Christian realist" and said that "one of the awful things about writing when you are a Christian is that for you the ultimate reality is the Incarnation, and nobody believes in the Incarnation, that is, nobody in your audience." Flannery wanted her audience to be broad and for that she strove to become the best story teller possible, beginning with her stint at the Iowa Writers Workshop. She went on to become required reading in college English courses. There are PhD theses galore now on this most excellent of American writers.

Although she died just as the Second Vatican Council was beginning, she was awesomely prescient in her observations on the Church, including its warts: "We sometimes have to suffer more from the Church than we do for it."

This is spiritual reading, yes, but it is also an inside look at a great artist.

I'm not doing justice to this book, nor to Flannery O'Connor herself. You will just have to see for yourself, which is all Flannery ever asked us to do.

A candid warning must be delivered: this is not a book for the timid. These stories resonate with horror and violence.

The concepts of violence are the common thread. Thankfully, O'Connor spares us the detailing of the violent acts. The ruminations about the same are as far as the reader must go.

In the first story - "A Good Man is Hard to Find" - innocent women and children are murdered without explanation or reason. The second and sixth stories - "The River" and "The Artificial Nigger" - delve with humiliation of the young and naive. The third and ninth stories - "The Life You Save May Be Your Own" and "Good Country People" - deal with mistrust and theft of the not-so-young and naive. And, then the losers of Darwinism are outlined in the fifth, eighth and tenth stories - "A Temple of the Holy Ghost", "A Late Encounter With The Enemy", and "The Displaced Person" - where adults are mistreated by societal norms.

Harsh results for those who "did nothing to deserve it" are too common in these stories. Trickling with southern dialect - much like Faulkner, Morrison or many of the other 20th century southern greats - this book phonetically spells their spoken words so as to deliver the reader to the point where one can almost taste the collard greens and grits.

After reading the first book, I ran to the internet to see who was first - "Deliverance" or this book as each depicts southern white men in a worst light - ignorant (maybe illiterate) murderers without reason who jump out of the woods with shotguns in hand. In "Deliverance", Dickey allowed good to prevail. O'Connor does quite the contrary. O'Connor's story precedes Dickey's novel by 15 years.

To those who prefer romance novels and lighter reading, this is not the cluster of stories which I would recommend. These stories do not touch upon light reading which concern fun concepts.
I like some harsh issues in literature. But, even these stories may have been more than I had bargained for.

But, I love southern literature - so I am biased to decry how much I enjoyed these stories. And, even those who less adore southern culture or literature would have to acknowledge this author's literary skill or talent.

If you have not the time for Faulkner in the immediate future, read a few of these stories. If you like them, you will probably enjoy Faulkner.

They are misfits, wanderers, and souls searching for faith and absolution. Many of them are, to one extent or another, hypocrites; others are almost unbelievably naive. All of them are Southerners -- and yet, even the most outlandish among Flannery O'Connor's protagonists come across as entirely believable, complex characters whom, regardless of location, you might expect to come across in your own travels, too; and there is no telling how such an encounter would turn out.

Of course, you would hope it does not prove quite as disastrous as the title story's chance meeting of a family taking a wrong turn (on the road as much as figuratively) and the self-proclaimed Misfit haunting that particular area of Georgia; which culminates in a bizarre conversation, the failure of communication underneath which only adds to the reader's growing feeling of helplessness in view of impending doom. And such a sense of irreversible destiny pervades many a story in this collection; yet, while as in O'Connor's writing in general, her and her protagonists' Catholic faith plays a dominant role in the course of the events, that course is not so much brought about by the hand of God as by the characters' own acts, decisions, judgments and prejudices.

Freakish as they are, O'Connor's (anti-)heroes are meant to be prophets, messengers of a long forgotten responsibility, as she explained in her 1963 essay "The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South:" their prophecy is "a matter of seeing near things with their extensions of meaning and thus of seeing far things close up." Often, she uses names, titles and items of every day life and imbues them with a new meaning in the context of her stories; this collection's title story, for example, is named for a blues song popularized by Bessie Smith in the late 1920s, and a cautionary road sign commonly seen in the 1950s ("The Life You Save May Be Your Own") becomes the title and motto of a story about a wanderer's encounter with a mother and her handicapped daughter who take him in, only to use that purported charity to their own advantage - at the end of which, predictably, nobody is the better off. Indeed, the endings of O'Connor's stories are as far from your standard happy ending as you can imagine; and while you cannot help but develop, early on, a premonition of doom, most of the time the precise nature of that doom is anything but predictable.

"A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories" was Flannery O'Connor's first published collection of short stories; yet, by the time these stories appeared (nine of the ten were published in various magazines between 1953 and 1955 before their inclusion in this 1955 collection) she was already an accomplished writer, with not only a novel under her belt ("Wise Blood," 1952) but also, and significantly, a master's thesis likewise consisting of a collection of short stories, entitled "The Geranium and Other Stories" (1947; first published as a collection in 1971's National Book Award winning "The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor," although several of those stories had likewise been published individually before). Two of the stories included in "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" count among O'Connor's six winners of the O'Henry Award for Short Fiction ("The Life You Save May Be Your Own" and "The Circle in the Fire," again an exploration of insincerity, half-hearted charity and its exploitation); and the collection as a whole, even more than her first novel, quickly established her as a masterful storyteller, endowed with vision, an unfailing sense for language and a supreme feeling for the use of irony; all of which have long since placed her firmly in the first tier of 20th century American authors.

Flannery O'Connor died, at the age of 39, of lupus, an inflammatory disease which in less severe forms may not be more than an (albeit substantial) nuisance, but which proved fatal in her case as well as that of her father before her. Her literary career, almost the sole focus of her life from the moment that she was diagnosed onwards, was thus cut short way before her time. Yet, to this day her writing holds a unique position in contemporary literature; and "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" is an excellent place to start exploring her work.