Books by Flannery O'Connor
The Complete Stories (FSG Classics)
Winner of the National Book Award
The publication of this extraordinary volume firmly established Flannery O'Connor's monumental contribution to American fiction.
There are thirty-one stories here in all, including twelve that do not appear in the only two story collections O'Connor put together in her short lifetime--Everything That Rises Must Converge and A Good Man Is Hard to Find.
O'Connor published her first story, "The Geranium," in 1946, while she was working on her master's degree at the University of Iowa. Arranged chronologically, this collection shows that her last story, "Judgement Day"--sent to her publisher shortly before her death―is a brilliantly rewritten and transfigured version of "The Geranium." Taken together, these stories reveal a lively, penetrating talent that has given us some of the most powerful and disturbing fiction of the twentieth century. Also included is an introduction by O'Connor's longtime editor and friend, Robert Giroux.
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$20.00
Wise Blood: A Novel (FSG Classics)
The American short story master Flannery O'Connor's haunting first novel of faith, false prophets, and redemptive wisdom.
Wise Blood, Flannery O'Connor's astonishing and haunting first novel, is a classic of twentieth-century literature. It is the story of Hazel Motes, a twenty-two-year-old caught in an unending struggle against his inborn, desperate fate. He falls under the spell of a "blind" street preacher named Asa Hawks and his degenerate fifteen-year-old daughter, Sabbath Lily. In an ironic, malicious gesture of his own non-faith, and to prove himself a greater cynic than Hawks, Motes founds the Church Without Christ, but is still thwarted in his efforts to lose God. He meets Enoch Emery, a young man with "wise blood," who leads him to a mummified holy child and whose crazy maneuvers are a manifestation of Motes's existential struggles.
This tale of redemption, retribution, false prophets, blindness, blindings, and wisdom gives us one of the most riveting characters in American fiction.
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A Good Man Is Hard To Find And Other Stories
An essential collection of classic stories that established Flannery O’Connor’s reputation as an American master of fiction―now with a new introduction by New York Times bestselling author Lauren Groff In 1955, with the title story and others in this critical edition, Flannery O’Connor firmly laid claim to her place as one of the most original and provocative writers of her generation. Steeped in a Southern Gothic tradition that would become synonymous with her name, these stories show O’Connor’s unique view of life―infused with religious symbolism, haunted by apocalyptic possibility, sustained by the tragic comedy of human behavior, confronted by the necessity of salvation. These classic stories―including “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” “Good Country People,” and “The Displaced Person,” among others, are sure to inspire future generations of fans and remind existing readers why she remains a master of the short story.
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$19.99
A Prayer Journal
"I would like to write a beautiful prayer," writes the young Flannery O'Connor in this deeply spiritual journal, recently discovered among her papers in Georgia. "There is a whole sensible world around me that I should be able to turn to Your praise." Written between 1946 and 1947 while O'Connor was a student far from home at the University of Iowa, A Prayer Journal is a rare portal into the interior life of the great writer. Not only does it map O'Connor's singular relationship with the divine, but it shows how entwined her literary desire was with her yearning for God. "I must write down that I am to be an artist. Not in the sense of aesthetic frippery but in the sense of aesthetic craftsmanship; otherwise I will feel my loneliness continually . . . I do not want to be lonely all my life but people only make us lonelier by reminding us of God. Dear God please help me to be an artist, please let it lead to You."
O'Connor could not be more plain about her literary ambition: "Please help me dear God to be a good writer and to get something else accepted," she writes. Yet she struggles with any trace of self-regard: "Don't let me ever think, dear God, that I was anything but the instrument for Your story."
As W. A. Sessions, who knew O'Connor, writes in his introduction, it was no coincidence that she began writing the stories that would become her first novel, Wise Blood, during the years when she wrote these singularly imaginative Christian meditations. Including a facsimile of the entire journal in O'Connor's own hand, A Prayer Journal is the record of a brilliant young woman's coming-of-age, a cry from the heart for love, grace, and art.
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The Violent Bear It Away: A Novel (FSG Classics)
A brilliant, innovative novel, acutely alert to where the sacred lives―and where it does not
First published in 1960, The Violent Bear It Away is a landmark in American literature―a dark and absorbing example of the Gothic sensibility and bracing satirical voice that are united in Flannery O'Connor's work.
In this, O'Connor's second novel, the orphaned Francis Marion Tarwater and his cousin, the schoolteacher Rayber, defy the prophecy of their dead uncle that Tarwater will become a prophet and baptize Rayber's young son, Bishop. A series of struggles ensues, as Tarwater fights an internal battle against his innate faith and the voices calling him to be a prophet while Rayber tries to draw Tarwater into a more "reasonable" modern world. Both wrestle with the legacy of their dead relative and lay claim to Bishop's soul. All this is observed by O'Connor with an astonishing combination of irony and compassion, humor and pathos.
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Everything That Rises Must Converge: Stories (FSG Classics)
Flannery O'Connor was working on Everything That Rises Must Converge at the time of her death. This collection is an exquisite legacy from a genius of the American short story, in which she scrutinizes territory familiar to her readers: race, faith, and morality. The stories encompass the comic and the tragic, the beautiful and the grotesque; each carries her highly individual stamp and could have been written by no one else.
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The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Special Award
"I have come to think that the true likeness of Flannery O'Connor will be painted by herself, a self-portrait in words, to be found in her letters . . . There she stands, a phoenix risen from her own words: calm, slow, funny, courteous, both modest and very sure of herself, intense, sharply penetrating, devout but never pietistic, downright, occasionally fierce, and honest in a way that restores honor to the word."―Sally Fitzgerald, from the Introduction
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Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose (FSG Classics)
This bold and brilliant collection is a must for all readers, writers, and students of American literature
When she died in 1964, Flannery O'Connor left behind a body of unpublished essays and lectures as well as a number of critical articles that had appeared in scattered publications during her lifetime. The brilliant pieces in Mystery and Manners, selected and edited by O'Connor's lifelong friends Sally and Robert Fitzgerald, are characterized by the boldness and simplicity of her style, a fine-tuned wit, understated perspicacity, and profound faith.
The book opens with "The King of the Birds," her famous account of raising peacocks at her home in Milledgeville, Georgia. There are three essays on regional writing, including "The Fiction Writer and His Country" and "Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction"; two on teaching literature, including "Total Effect and the Eighth Grade"; and four on the writer and religion, including "The Catholic Novel in the Protestant South." Essays such as "The Nature and Aim of Fiction" and "Writing Short Stories" are gems. Their value to the contemporary reader―and writer―is inestimable.
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Good Things Out of Nazareth: The Uncollected Letters of Flannery O'Connor and Friends
A literary treasure of over one hundred unpublished letters from seminal American author and National Book Award-winner, Flannery O'Connor, the subject of the biographical film, "Wildcat" (2024) starring Maya Hawke (directed by Ethan Hawke).
Good Things Out of Nazareth contains many of O'Connor's previously unpublished letters. These epistolary gems deepen our knowledge of this master of the short story in ongoing "revelations" The letters enable "moviegoers" just discovering O'Connor, as well as her enduring readers to deepen their understanding as O'Connor traces her efforts in the 1960s to write the searing stories later featured in "Wildcat." The letters reveal O'Connor's own comments about her fiction and the writings of her peers.. The collection also contains the beautiful letters from O'Connor's Jesuit priest/ friend consoling those mourning her death..
Good Things is the only collection that features invaluable historical context of the tumultuous times when O'Connor was writing in the 1960s. The editor, Ben Boatwright Alexander, studied with one of O'Connor's teachers himself. He knew some of her literary friends and visited with O'Connor's family in Milledgeville, Georgia. He even read in 2004 at a literary event "Good Country People" aloud in the wee hours at O'Connor's house, Andalusia. These rare experiences enable Dr. Alexander to provide an historical backdrop to O'Connor's letters little known or taught today. His collection forms a riveting literary portrait of O'Connor as well as her friends--— such as fellow believers, Walker Percy (The Moviegoer) and Caroline Gordon (None Shall Look), famed publisher, Robert Giroux and movie critic, Stanley Kauffmann. Here we find their joys and loves, as well as their trials and tribulations as they struggle with doubt and illness while relying on faith to chart a path in an uncertain world.
Praise for Good Things Out of Nazareth
"An epistolary group portrait that will appeal to readers interested in the Catholic underpinnings of O'Connor's life and work . . . These letters by the National Book Award-winning short story writer and her friends alternately fit and break the mold. Anyone looking for Southern literary gossip will find plenty of barbs. . . . But there's also higher-toned talk on topics such as the symbolism in O'Connor's work and the nature of free will."—Kirkus Reviews
"A fascinating set of Flannery O'Connor's correspondence . . . The compilation is highlighted by gems from O'Connor's writing mentor, Caroline Gordon. . . . While O'Connor's milieu can seem intimidatingly insular, the volume allows readers to feel closer to the writer, by glimpsing O'Connor's struggles with lupus, which sometimes leaves her bedridden or walking on crutches, and by hearing her famously strong Georgian accent in the colloquialisms she sprinkles throughout the letters. . . . This is an important addition to the knowledge of O'Connor, her world, and her writing."—Publishers Weekly
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Flannery O'Connor : Collected Works : Wise Blood / A Good Man Is Hard to Find / The Violent Bear It Away / Everything that Rises Must Converge / Essays & Letters (Library of America)
In her short lifetime, Flannery O’Connor became one of the most distinctive American writers of the twentieth century. By birth a native of Georgia and a Roman Catholic, O’Connor depicts, in all its comic and horrendous incongruity, the limits of worldly wisdom and the mysteries of divine grace in the “Christ-haunted” Protestant South. This Library of America collection, the most comprehensive ever published, contains all of her novels and short-story collections, as well as nine other stories, eight of her most important essays, and a selection of 259 witty, spirited, and revealing letters, twenty-one published here for the first time.
Her fiction brilliantly explores the human obsession with seemingly banal things. It might be a new hat or clean hogs or, for Hazel Motes, hero of Wise Blood (1952), an automobile. “Nobody with a good car needs to be justified,” Hazel assures himself while using its hood for a pulpit to preach his “Church Without Christ.” As in O’Connor’s subsequent work, the characters in this novel are driven to violence, even murder, and their strong vernacular endows them with the discomforting reality of next-door neighbors. “In order to recognize a freak,” she remarks in one of her essays, “you have to have a conception of the whole man.”
In the title story of her first, dazzling collection of stories, A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955), the old grandmother discovers the comic irrelevance of good manners when she and her family meet up with the sinister Misfit, who claims there is “no pleasure but meanness.” The terror of urban dislocation in “The Artificial Nigger,” the bizarre baptism in “The River,” or one-legged Hulga Hopewell’s encounter with a Bible salesman in “Good Country People”—these startling events give readers the uneasy sense of mysteries about to be revealed.
Her second novel, The Violent Bear It Away (1960), casts the shadow of the Old Testament across a landscape of backwoods shacks, modern towns, and empty highways. Caught between the prophetic fury of his great-uncle and the unrelenting rationalism of his uncle, fourteen-year-old Francis Tarwater undergoes a terrifying trial of faith when he is commanded to baptize his idiot cousin.
The nine stories in Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965) show O’Connor’s powers at their height. The title story is a terrifying, heart-rending drama of familial and racial misunderstanding. “Revelation” and “The Enduring Chill” probe further into conflicts between parental figures and recalcitrant offspring, where as much tension is generated from quiet conversation as from the physical violence of gangsters and fanatics.
LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
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The Complete Stories: (Centennial Edition) (FSG Classics)
Winner of the National Book Award
Now with a new essay by Hilton Als and a redesigned cover, Flannery O’Connor’s The Complete Stories is the essential collection of this legendary author’s most infamous works.
This is the essential volume of the stories of Flannery O’Connor.
In these sly, laconic, and fiercely observed works, O’Connor does nothing less than elaborate a unique and new way of seeing the world. Contorting her sharply drawn characters through her Southern Gothic prism, she produces a panorama unequaled in its vision of the interplays of faith, evil, humor, violence, and compassion that embody American life.
These thirty-one chronologically ordered stories include twelve that do not appear in the only two story collections O’Connor put together in her short lifetime―Everything That Rises Must Converge and A Good Man Is Hard to Find.
Taken together, these stories reveal O’Connor’s abiding and visionary gift―one that has given us some of the most powerful and disturbing fiction of the twentieth century. Also included is an introduction by O’Connor’s longtime editor and friend, Robert Giroux. New to this centennial edition is an essay by the critic Hilton Als.
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Flannery O'Connor: Spiritual Writings (Modern Spiritual Masters Series.)
Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964) is widely regarded as one of the great American writers of the twentieth century, author of singular short stories (including "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" and "The Life You Save May Be Your Own") and two novels (Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away). Only in 1979, however, with the publication of her collected letters, could the public fully see the depth of her personal faith and her wisdom as a spiritual guide. Drawing from all O'Connor's work, and including the complete text of her short story, "Revelation", this anthology highlights as never before her distinctive voice as a spiritual writer, covering such topics as Christian Realism, the Church, the relation between faith and art, sin and grace, and the role of suffering in the life of a Christian.
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Flannery O'Connor: The Cartoons HC
Reveals that author Flannery O'Connor originally wanted to be a cartoonist and collects her early comics, which display many of the story-telling techniques that she later used in her writing.
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Flannery O'Connor Collection
by Flannery O'Connor, Robert Barron
Word on Fire’s Flannery O’Connor Collection introduces readers to one of the most celebrated writers of the twentieth century. Many are initially hesitant to approach O’Connor’s work, as she is known for her use of the shocking and grotesque; but it is in these moments of great darkness that she allows for the greatest breakthroughs of grace, revealing a deep understanding of human nature that is Catholic through and through. This collection features famous short stories like “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” the entire novel The Violent Bear It Away, and many of O’Connor’s letters and essays that explicate the themes of her works. Valuable to the seasoned fan and first-time reader alike, it seeks to lend a better understanding and deeper appreciation of her literary output.
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