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Loading... The Complete Storiesby Flannery O'Connor
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. "She would of been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life." Great stuff. (  ) hilaritas | Oct 19, 2009 |  "She would of been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life." Great stuff. ( ) hilaritas | Oct 19, 2009 | After reading The Complete Stories, I am now thoroughly convinced that Flannery O'Connor is indeed one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. I loved every single story I read mostly for the hypocrisy, ridiculousness, and self-delusion of the characters. It gives me a sort of guilty pleasure to hear the characters say something that we know is completely untrue. O'Connor uses the impressive technique of what I like to call "distant narration": the narrator holds the characters at a distance through syntax, resulting in a schism between what the character knows and what the reader knows, and the reader ends up knowing more about the characters and their situations than the characters do themselves. It's because of this technique that I believe we are able to so easily read about such blatant situations of racial and class prejudice: we know the characters are insipid and thus don't take them and their backwards beliefs too seriously. (  ) stephxsu | Oct 3, 2009 | Great short story writing. Very raw and honest. Mostly about southern experiences and blacks and prejudice. ( ) kimoqt | Aug 20, 2009 | Brutal. I was racking my brain to come up with the perfect superlative to describe O'Connor's short stories and nothing fits better. All of the recurring themes—racism, murder, loss, pain, religious fanaticism—are written with an edge that can make you physically wince while reading. This collection is no chore to read, though. Once you acclimatize yourself to her slowed down style of plot development, the thoughts and dialogue of the characters command your attention. Speaking of characters, O'Connor's are larger-than-life yet completely believable. Read one of these stories on a park bench somewhere and you will see the characters stumble past you. Flawed humanity has never looked so beautiful. ( )1  StephenBarkley | Jul 13, 2009 |  no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0374515360, Paperback)Winner of the National Book AwardThe 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. (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:01 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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