Overview

This collection of nine short stories by Flannery O'Connor was published posthumously in 1965. The flawed characters of each story are fully revealed in apocalyptic moments of conflict and violence that are presented with comic detachment. The title story is a tragicomedy about social pride, racial bigotry, generational conflict, false liberalism, and filial dependence. The protagonist, Julian Chestny, is hypocritically disdainful of his mother's prejudices, but his smug selfishness is replaced with childish fear when she suffers a fatal stroke after being struck by a black woman she has insulted out of oblivious ignorance rather than malice. Similarly, The Comforts of Home is about an intellectual son with an Oedipus complex. Driven by the voice of his dead father, the son accidentally kills his sentimental mother in an attempt to murder a harlot. The other stories are A View of the Woods, Parker's Back, The Enduring Chill, Greenleaf, The Lame Shall Enter First, Revelation, and Judgment Day. 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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9781441753762

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Reviews

All in all they comprise the best collection of shorter fiction to have been published in America during the past twenty years. -- Book Week Bronson Pinchot, Karen White, Mark Bramhall, and Lorna Raver flawlessly convey the characters' ignorance as well as their gut-wrenching epiphanies...This production expertly communicates O'Connor's literary complexity. -- AudioFile The current volume of posthumous stories is the work of a master, a writer's writer--but a reader's too--an incomparable craftsman who wrote, let it be said, some of the finest stories in our language. -- Newsweek When I read Flannery O'Connor, I do not think of Hemingway, or Katherine Anne Porter, or Sartre, but rather of someone like Sophocles. What more can you say for a writer? I write her name with honor, for all the truth and all the craft with which she shows man's fall and his dishonor. -- Thomas Merton

Author Information

Flannery O'Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1925. She was awarded the Best of the National Book Awards for Fiction in 2009, and she was the first fiction writer born in the twentieth century to have her works collected and published by the Library of America. When she died at the age of thirty-nine, America lost one of its most gifted writers at the height of her powers. Bronson Pinchot, an Audie Award-winning narrator and Audible's Narrator of the Year for 2010, received his education at Yale University, which filled out what he had already received at his mother's knee in the all-important areas of Shakespeare, Greek art and architecture, and the Italian Renaissance. He restores Greek Revival buildings and appears in television, film, and on stage whenever the pilasters and entablatures overwhelm him. Karen White is a classically trained actress who has been recording audiobooks since 1999. An Audie Award finalist, she has earned eight AudioFile Earphones Awards. Her reading of The Hemingses of Monticello by Annette Gordon-Reed was named one of AudioFile's Best Audiobooks of 2009. Mark Bramhall has won the prestigious Audie Award for best narration, more than thirty AudioFile Earphones Awards, and has repeatedly been named by AudioFile magazine and Publishers Weekly among their Best Voices of the Year. He is also an award-winning actor whose acting credits include off-Broadway, regional, and many Los Angeles venues as well as television, animation, and feature films. He has taught and directed at the American Academy of Dramatic Art. Lorna Raver, named one of AudioFile magazine's Best Voices of the Year, has received numerous Audie nominations and AudioFile Earphones Awards. An experienced stage actress, she has also guest-starred on many top television series and starred in director Sam Raimi's film Drag Me to Hell. Among her many Blackstone titles are The Age of Innocence, Up from Orchard Street, The Lodger, Selected Readings from the Portable Dorothy Parker, and Diamond Ruby.

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