Flannery O'Connor

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...

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 innate, desperate faith. He falls under the spell of a “blind” street preacher named Asa Hawks and his degenerate fifteen-year-old daughter. In an ironic, malicious gesture of his own non-faith, and to prove himself a greater cynic than Hawks, Hazel...

Written between 1946 and 1947, while O'Connor was a student far from home at the University of Iowa, this spiritual journal was only recently discovered. It provides a rare portal into the interior life of a great writer, and is a record of a young woman's cry from the heart for love, grace, and art.

U.S. Army war veteran Hazel Motes may not be a believing Christian, but he somehow makes observations about the state of a run-down country church and understands that there are ridiculous frauds on the streets. Memories inspire him to take up, after initially refusing, to take on the part of a traveling preacher when a cab driver insists he looks like one in his new hat. He starts his own new Church of Truth, without the crucified Jesus. His first...

Collects forty short stories published between 1915 and 2015, from writers that include Ernest Hemingway, John Updike, and Alice Munro that exemplify their era and stand the test of time --