Robert Fitzgerald (1) (1971–)

A reading friend encouraged me to continue reading O'Connor after I expressed the miserable experience with [Wise Blood], and I'm glad he did. [A Good man is Hard to Find] deserves to be in the canon of best short fiction ever written. These essays, posthumously collected, deserve the same treatment in the canon of writing about writing. This may be one of the best books I've ever read on the writing process, the aspects of fiction, and the value of storytelling. You can find many of the show more pieces in the collected works of O'Connor, but they serve as a nice self-contained collection all on their own. O'Connor may have thought on her place in literature, and her work's connection to faith and spirituality, more than any other author I've come across. Her sense of place, as a Southern writer or religiously-influenced writer, is really a broader comment on her own practice of faith more than anything else. These works should be mandatory reading in any Master of Fine Arts Creative Writing program - we'd see an elevation of the work if they were.

5 bones!!!!!
Highly recommended show less

This is a great collection of, as the subtitle states clearly, the occasional essays penned by O'Connor. While no theme ties the material together, it yet offers a genuine insight into her thinking on matters as idiosyncratic as raising peacocks, and as steeped and penetrating as her views on writing short stories. If you're already a fan of her work - and I am - then you'll be delighted with this text. It almost feels like the kind of conversation one might have had with her in a coffee show more shop or at the front of a room after a conference presentation, and yet her writing contains the kind of edge and humour that can only come from craft. show less

I'm always leery of posthumous collections of writing, especially when they're described as "uncollected occasional prose." This particular book contains a mish-mash of speeches, student workshop presentations, odd ruminations on Catholic fiction writers and their readers, and the standout essay at the beginning, "The King of the Birds." I would've been happy if I'd stopped after that one. But instead I plodded on, skipping over quite a bit, hoping for another winner that never came. show more O'Connor does make a few interesting observations about writing but a lot of it comes out sounding dated, given how much has changed in the literary sphere since she was writing. I'm skeptical that O'Connor would've approved of this collection, as she seems like she would've been the type to have very good reasons for publishing or not publishing a particular piece of writing. Certainly posthumous publication should be considered on a case-by-case basis, but in this case, I don't think leaving the majority of these pieces unpublished would've been considered a disservice to her readership. show less

I always liked O'Connor's stories but when I read this collection of essays I felt I was in the same room with her and that she was talking directly to me. Much of the time she sounds like she's thinking out loud, trying out ideas and sharing idle thoughts that she's still shaping. But all her ideas are carefully formed and presented.