Flannery is a beautiful person; reading these letters you feel like you are conversing with a personal friend and hope you get the chance to meet her; you can't help but wish you could have had the chance to correspond with her.
After years of loving her fiction, I found that, in these letters, her fiction and her soul unveil their beauty --- just like her beloved peafowl.

This is simply my favorite epistolary collection. Of course, adoring O'Connor and her works helps. But even if you've never read her and simply want to spend an engaging few days in the company of a remarkable and funny woman, this is the place to be. I've gotten rid of a lot of books over the years, but this one has held its place on my shelf. Since you can't borrow it from me, hit that "Add to Cart" button!

THE HABIT OF BEING is required reading for any Flannery O'Connor fan. Nobody can explain Flannery like Flannery. Through her letters the reader has an immediate connection to the writer and the woman, and that connection made me regret even more that I did not know her personally. Sally Fitzgerald includes letters that show Flannery's human side, her cranky side, her funny side, even her arrogant side. I read the letters before the identity of A was revealed, and I was intrigued. I went back and read them again after that identify was made public, and I'm even more intrigued. To understand fully what Flannery was attempting in her stories, one needs to read the letters. To understand fully what she was attempting in her life, one needs to read the letters. No satisfactory biography has been written about Flannery O'Connor, but I'm not sure that one is necessary when we have at least a start at an autobiography with THE HABIT OF BEING.

The author sets a high bar and then glides over it.
In a word, one of the best books I've ever read.

If you are interested in any one of the four authors represented here (Day, Merton, O'Connor, Percy) you will find the context and comparisons that Elie makes extremely illuminating. It is a challenging task to interweave four biographies in a way that is interesting and mutually enriching. Elie does it. He writes well and his comparisons of these four along with other important influences are always clear and helpful. Very well done piece of work.

I stumbled upon an advance reader's copy of this work in a used bookshop--I had never heard of the book's author, an editor at FSG, but I was curious to find out how he would weave together the stories of his four subjects: Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Flannery O'Connor, and Walker Percy. At first glance, they seemed to have little in common apart from their religion.

As Elie shows in this entertaining and informative book, these writers were all highly aware of each other, and would meet on their separate "pilgrimages" toward authentic spirituality in increasingly secular times. "The School of the Holy Ghost" (as this quartet was once called) was not a school at all, as the Imagists or the Beats were; however, Elie shows, they felt a profound kinship, and one of the most fascinating aspects of the book is Elie's depiction of how they reached out to each other, through fan letters, postcards, reviews, publishing each other's work, and not-always-successful meetings (Merton and Percy had little to say to one another as they sipped bourbon on the porch of Merton's hermitage in Kentucky.)

Above all, what brought these Catholic believers together was a love of literature, and Elie's book happily overflows with this same virtue. Whether discussing Day and Merton's dispute over Vietnam draft card burning, or the racism of O'Connor's letters, Elie writes elegant and opinionated prose. He shows how hard these people had to struggle to find a path for themselves, and how they came to see struggle as an inherent quality of faith. His readings of O'Connor and Percy's fiction are astute, and he productively contrasts Day's activism with Merton's withdrawal into solitude. Elie's use of letters--especially O'Connor's--brings out the voices of the principals, and at the end of the book, you feel that you know them personally. I would recommend this superb synthesis to anyone interested in the intersection of faith and literature.

This is another great book from Bill Roorbach adding to his SUMMERS WITH JULIET and WRITING LIFE STORIES. Roorbach writes with masculine vigor without being macho. His empathy for the elderly equals his concern for normal people with lonely hearts. He is a romantic through and through. After reading BIG BEND, you want to read everything this brilliant and sympathetic author puts out. Read this and watch for more.

I read this wonderful collection of stories with a sense of absolute delight. Bill Roorbach knows the secret desires in the hearts of all his befuddled, passionate men. In "Fog," he enters the world of a boy's first romantic love and makes it surprising and new, erotic and terrifying, thrilling and funny: "Then she wanted to know how it felt and I wanted to know how she felt and we said tingling and bursting, the same for both of us, almost hurtful, and she said, 'Love you.' Which I tried to say, too, but it came out just like the vowel sounds in English class." The remarkable "Taughannock Falls" has the sweep and complexity of a full novel, though it fills only thirteen pages. Two middle-aged men, estranged since one married the other's girlfriend twenty years earlier, re-enter each other's lives under extraordinary circumstances: Stephen has fallen into a mysterious catatonic state, and Bob believes he might be the only one with enough knowledge, love, anger, and desire to pull him out again. "Not a movement from my old friend. Not a blink of the eye, not a nod of the head, not a tear on the cheek, not a tap of the foot, not a twitch of the lip. He looks tremendous--healthy and wise, clean and brave, courteous and kind." When Stephen finally snaps open, he is a bursting boy, delivered not into the present, not into his handsome, forty-five-year-old body--but tossed backward into the life he left in his twenties, into a time when no love surpasses the manic joy he feels with his friend "Bobbo." What amazes me about all the stories in this collection is Bill Roorbach's vision of grace. There's a fast heat on the surface of every tale, a love of language that is playful and exact. The levity, the crisp dialogue, the sharp sting of interior revelation, all serve as counterpoints to quiet explorations of mercy and forgiveness, tenderness and compassion. The title piece is a tour de force that pushes Bill Roorbach's enormous talents as a storyteller to their limits. Dennis Hunter--wealthy, widowed, seventy-four years old and still bound by love to his wife Betty--is an unlikely candidate for a job with the United States Forest Service that pays just above minimum wage. And he's an even more unlikely candidate for a troubling, giddy, unavoidable attachment to a married woman in her forties who watches birds and weighs as much as he does. But Mr. Roorbach is a writer who knows and celebrates love at every age, in every marvelous incarnation. These two will swim the River of Ghosts to make love in Mexico where Martha believes she won't be breaking a parting promise to her husband, a vow "not to mess around with any man in Texas." This isn't an easy moment physically or spritually, and Dennis Hunter, besieged by desire, never lets us forget the moral complexities, the fear, or the wonder. "She was forty-seven and married and standing waist deep and naked in the Rio Grande not twenty feet from Mexico. Dennis felt her gaze . . . and followed Martha, climbed in the river after her . . . he was being swept away in the current, pictured himself washed up on a flat rock dead and naked miles downstream. But Martha got hold of his hand laughing and they stood waist deep together in the stream rushing past, silty, sweetly warm water." This collection is pure pleasure for all the senses, a balm for the spirit, an immersion in a world where passion is the greatest risk and love the only certain path to rapture and redemption.

The best word I can think of to describe this writing is punchy. Spencer artfully packs so much into quick and lovely sentences. His stories evoked much thought for me about his characters. I wasn't always sure I liked them (the characters), but they were always real. I'd definitely recommend this book.

No one writes with more pathos about modern life than Darrell Spencer. His characters are brave but muddled, and the troubles about which they must be brave are generally too absurd (the sign painter whose employee misspells "entertainment" and provokes a cranky Las Vegas mob boss, or the ex-Mormon jogger whose devout neighbor wants to pray for his hamstring in the temple) to find much comfort--or nobility--in their lives. What's remarkable about Spencer, though, is that he finds nobility in the mundane, mostly by giving voice to the perplexed Mormons (and faithless but still looking-for-faith Mormons), puzzled husbands, fabric store clerks, trailer park host, and deaf people who suffer, joke, and survive in these stories. If you like short stories, you absolutely must read "Late-Night TV" and "It's a Lot Scarier if You Take Jesus Out."

There is a temptation to say that O'Conner is just out there. DiRenzo does a great job putting O'conner in context.

Several years ago I did extensive college-level work on the writings of Flannery O'Connor. I found two books particularly helpful in understanding the fullness of O'Connor's achievement, this book and Brian Ragen's "A Wreck on the Road to Damascus." Baumgaertner writes from a similar theological perspective, and though I do not believe she is a Roman Catholic as O'Connor was, she writes with understanding and sympathy for O'Connor's position. I bring up the religious issue only because any in-depth study of O'Connor must face the fact of her deep commitment to her beliefs.
The books is very readable, and though Jill Baumgaertner is a professor (at Wheaton College, Illinois) she takes pains to avoid the academic jargon that marrs much critical writing today. If what you want is a sympathetic insightful reading of O'Connor then there is no better book to start with. However, if what you want is "hip" academic jargon then read Kreyling's collection.

I'm so respectful to the author! As the title suggests, this is a reference guide to Flannery O'Connor's criticism. More than 2,700, from published books to master theses (including foreign ones), are listed with annotations, each of which is very clear and helpful. There are also indexes, and we can find what we're looking for by author's names and subjects. I really thank the Internet technology for bringing me this great book!

If you are looking for a comprehensive collection of Flannery O'Connor's works search no further. This excellent volume contains all of the best of O'Connor's writings in addition to her letters. You couldn't ask for a better resource for those who are O'Connor fans and for those who are teaching any courses about Flannery O'Connor.

The major criticism that I have of this book is not content but the way it is put together. Ordinarily you would have an index in the front of the book. In this case the index is at the end and the stories are not in a systematic order to make it easier for the reader to find. I am surprised that there is not at least a one page introduction about the author to help put her work in historical perspective and introduce her to new readers. Those are the "major" technical flaws that I find with the book otherwise it is a must have volume to have in your personal library.

The cover blurbs on my old O'Connor paperbacks always refer to the "humor" of her stories. Well, if this is humor, then the reviewers have pretty sick minds.

What you get nearly every time with Flannery is a story that drags you over broken glass and down red-clay roads and introduces you to some people with severe religious issues and sado-masochistic channels for expressing them.

Much is made of Flannery's Catholicism, mostly by ignorant secular reviewers who wouldn't even notice the discrepancy of a crucifix standing behind a black Baptist choir in a Madonna video. But in her fiction, O'Connor's Christianity is a bizarre, doctrineless ooze that characters absorb or battle with, but not in a way that most writers on religion would recognize. Flannery is too clever for that, combining scary medieval flagellent self-denigration with Bible-belt paranoia.

You can't even start talking about American literature until you've read Flannery.

Move over Hemingway, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald, Stein, Wolfe and, yes, even William Faulkner. Flannery O'connor is the greatest American literary mind that the 20th Century ever produced. Upon completing this magisterial collection of her work, superbly edited and finely bound by the American Library, the reader will no doubt fall under the spell of Flannery O'Connor just as I did when I first read "Parker's back" upon a whim after browsing listlessly through a bookstore. It took me about a 1/2 hour with a cup of coffee by my side to leaf through the story, and from that time forward I was forever captivated by everything to do with Flannery. The only other reading experience I've had that can even come close to Flannery's bludgeoning me between the eyes with her descriptive pen-hammer was when I first read "Bartleby the Scrivener" by Herman Melville. And when your a writer who's style and vision lends itself to the bizarre and the grotesque, while all the while maintaining a thoroughly moral underpinning to your work, there is no better company to be in than this greatest of 19th century American writers. Read this woman! You will not go away empty-minded. After being thoroughly entertained, you will only go away much wiser and completely satisfied. I guarantee it.

Flannery O'Connor shares opinions about (mainly) writing in this collection of previously unpublished transcripts of lectures. At times the text seems unwieldy, perhaps because the editors faced the dual duties of fidelity to the original work, and a need to prune over 50 transcripts into a non-repetitious form. There is also a clever editorial sleight of hand, with the inclusion of the first essay on the peacocks and pea hens - I was confused by it at first, then half way through the book realised it set the mood, the tone of how to read the book. That after reading 'King of the Birds', we have an impression of Flannery O'Connor - that she is a stickler for detail - which informs the rest of our reading. It is an experiential understanding of what she means when she says that a story should not be dissected but read as a whole, stands as a whole, and the whole informs whatever understanding we get out of it.

Lots of delicious gems in here for anyone who wants to see the other side of Flannery O'Connor's work. In a way it is a contradiction that this book was published at all, as the author felt that the obsessions writers have about how other writers work, what other writers think about writing, was pointless. She believed that all was contained in the stories themselves. Are we going to take her advice?

This book is rich with humor, insight, courage, practical tips on the writing life. It includes the reader as an honored guest and sends the reader back out into the world satisfied and eager. In an age that mocks simple faith and profits by the downfall of belief even as it piously and hypocritically scolds those who have been misguided, this book is good news. It is a heartening guide back to the world where faith is fresh and plenteous and the faithful are not confounded for their beliefs but are encouraged by the warmth the book generates. The heart is ignited and a good journey is begun with the author as a companion. This book contains a wealth that promises to stay around for all time.

As an engineering student, I lean towards thinking of mystery as something temporary and, well, bad. The whole goal behind scientific research is to expel mystery - at least in the immediate context. Flannery O'Connor's timeless writings opened my eyes to the world beyond certainty, and I had to nod in agreement at her insightful appreciations of human quirkiness or critiques on deviatory literature teaching methods. (Of course science know uncertainty at the atomic/subatomic level, but we call that statistics.) In the end, I marvel at the little gems in this book, thoughtfully crafted by a master artist, laced with earthy truth and nitty-gritty humanness, and don't hesitate to recommend at least a library peek to anyone.

If you love O'Connor, you should own this, and if you have never read O'Connor, buy this book and begin ASAP! O'Connor's stories expose the complexities and frailties of being human, and you'll be struck by their profundity, a profundity that I find sorely missing in modern short stories (I've been reading the fiction issue of "The New Yorker"). But perhaps what I love most about O'Connor is her sense of humor. One of her most anthologized stories, "A Good Man is Hard to Find," is as funny as it is dark (I'm thinking of the scene when "a horrible thought" occurs to the grandmother in the car). O'Connor is simply one of the best short story writers of the 20th century.

Fans of O. Henry and other short story writers would do well to read the collected stories of Flannery O'Connor. Though the stories are as rural as O. Henry's are urban, the sense of irony and tragedy remains the same, as does the sense of comedy. O'Connor was, beyond a shadow of a doubt, a superbly gifted technical writer.

However, what takes O'Connor beyond the works of O. Henry is the theology behind so many of her stories. Raised in the deep South with several religious influences throughout her years, O'Connor struggled relentlessly with questions of faith, mercy, grace, forgiveness, and justification, especially in connection to social and racial prejudice. Readers will be hammered time and time again with O'Connor's understanding of what it means to be a sinner and what it means to stand under grace, and it is not for the faint of heart.

Among the many stories worth mentioning are "A Good Man Is Hard To Find", "The River", "The Artificial Nigger", and "Revelation." These four stories by themselves would be worth the price of this collection - the rest simply add to the value. Any collection of 20th century fiction is incomplete without something from O'Connor, whose life was tragically cut short just as her work began to be truly appreciated.

I cannot praise Flannery O'Connor enough. Though I have read a couple of her novels, I find her most effective in her short stories. This collection of short stories by Flannery O'Connor is one of my favorite books. She is unquestionably one of the best American authors of the twentieth century.

Each story gives insight to another of humanity's secrets. O'Connor investigates the very nature of humans and paints a disturbing picture. Her stories look at what makes us tick, what haunts us, and how we give meaning to our lives. Each account gives another glimpse into O'Connor's mind. Some stories, particularly "A Good Man is Hard to Find" make me shiver to even think about.

A highly recommended book that contains memorable stories and a beautiful writing style.