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Product Description
Product Description
This is the complete collection of stories from one of the most original and powerful American writers of the twentieth-century. Including A Good Man is Hard to Find and Everything That Rises Must Converge, this collection also contains several stories only available in this volume.
About the Author
Flannery O'Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia in 1925, the only child of Catholic parents. In 1945 she enrolled at the Georgia State College for Women. After earning her degree she continued her studies on the University of Iowa's writing program, and her first published story, 'The Geranium', was written while she was still a student. Her writing is best-known for its explorations of religious themes and southern racial issues, and for combining the comic with the tragic. After university, she moved to New York where she continued to write. In 1952 she learned that she was dying of lupus, a disease which had afflicted her father. For the rest of her life, she and her mother lived on the family dairy farm, Andalusia, outside Millidgeville, Georgia. For pleasure she raised peacocks, pheasants, swans, geese, chickens and Muscovy ducks. She was a good amateur painter. She died in the summer of 1964.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
To be honest I had never heard of Flannery O'Connor before seeing it advertised in the back of a copy of Jack Finney's `The body snatchers'.
O'Connor's stories are mostly pretty short but she somehow managed to pour more feeling and description into them than many writers manage in a whole novel.
Set in the deep south of an America now long gone. Her protagonists are poor, both white & black,(be aware that her reference to black Americans may have been seen as sympathetic and forward thinking for her day and although still sympathetic in viewpoint she used language that is distinctly racist in the modern world),. Often scrabbling to survive they all share common points. They are lonely, often confused, ground down by life or by the many selfish & harmful predators who they meet or share their lives with and hope is something long since extinguished in their lives.
There are exceptions to those rules here and there but they are few and far between.
O'Connor's ability to place her reader on a sweltering sidewalk in a fading main street in nowheresville or in the kitchen of a broken down shack is startling and is what at first keeps you reading. The detail somehow seems almost too much to take in yet takes up so little of the narrative that it's impossible not to be drawn in. Then the characters grow too so that although you move from story to story quickly the characters stay with you and their plight & that brief moment of their lives you've been shown lingers in the memory long after you've put the book down.
Not every story appeals to everyone but so many do that the overall feeling of `being there' and the emotion you feel remains deep and affecting.
This collection is testament to a talent that has, certainly in this country, been overlooked and really ought to be as feted amongst the classics.
An excellent collection of stories that hold a magnifying glass over the human condition and leaves an indelible impression upon the reader.
O'Connor's stories are mostly pretty short but she somehow managed to pour more feeling and description into them than many writers manage in a whole novel.
Set in the deep south of an America now long gone. Her protagonists are poor, both white & black,(be aware that her reference to black Americans may have been seen as sympathetic and forward thinking for her day and although still sympathetic in viewpoint she used language that is distinctly racist in the modern world),. Often scrabbling to survive they all share common points. They are lonely, often confused, ground down by life or by the many selfish & harmful predators who they meet or share their lives with and hope is something long since extinguished in their lives.
There are exceptions to those rules here and there but they are few and far between.
O'Connor's ability to place her reader on a sweltering sidewalk in a fading main street in nowheresville or in the kitchen of a broken down shack is startling and is what at first keeps you reading. The detail somehow seems almost too much to take in yet takes up so little of the narrative that it's impossible not to be drawn in. Then the characters grow too so that although you move from story to story quickly the characters stay with you and their plight & that brief moment of their lives you've been shown lingers in the memory long after you've put the book down.
Not every story appeals to everyone but so many do that the overall feeling of `being there' and the emotion you feel remains deep and affecting.
This collection is testament to a talent that has, certainly in this country, been overlooked and really ought to be as feted amongst the classics.
An excellent collection of stories that hold a magnifying glass over the human condition and leaves an indelible impression upon the reader.
47 of 54 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Flannery O'Connor was a genius. Her prose is beautifully restrained, powerful, frightening and, disturbingly, often hilarious. I haven't encountered a writer of short fiction yet who hasn't doffed their cap to O'Connor. This collection takes the reader from slightly scrappy early writings to the faultless work of her final years. The stories here are so essential that I am giving this book five stars despite its revolting 1980s conceptual jacket, which depicts a baldie with a triangular penis standing in what can only be described as a Drama Space.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Originally, I bought the book because I wanted to read "A good man is hard to find". I started reading from the beginning of the book, and every novel surpriced me in its own way. Sometimes the story itself makes me wonder, and sometimes it's the style of the writing that gets me.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Southern Life.
An excellent book about everyday people of the Southern States of the U S, to enjoy it you need get the voice sounds right. Read more
Published 3 months ago by J. Hawkey
Crack open a co'cola, sit down and enjoy
This book was recommended to me by a friend, and I would definitely pass on this recommendation to anyone who enjoys short stories. Read more
Published 16 months ago by Jimbo
Flannery O'Conner 'The Complete Stories'
Every sentence so very rich. What a loss to the literary world when O'Conner died at a relatively young age. Read more
Published on 9 Oct 2007 by A. Forrest
Recommended by The Independent newspaper today.
Just thought you'd like to know, this book just got a glowing write-up by Dean Koontz in "The Independent" newspaper today, describing it as a "book in a lifetime" and his... Read more
Published on 5 Jan 2007 by J. C. Henderson
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