The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor

This collection gathers all thirty-one short stories Flannery O'Connor wrote, arranged in the order of their composition, from her earliest student work to the pieces she finished shortly before her death in 1964. Twelve of the stories had not appeared in her two earlier collections, A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Everything That Rises Must Converge, and the book closes with a late reworking of her very first published story. Set mostly in the small towns and farms of the American South, the stories follow preachers, con men, widows, farm families and self-satisfied intellectuals whose certainties are shattered, often violently, by moments of grace. O'Connor's dark comedy and Catholic vision made her one of the defining voices of Southern fiction. Introduced by her friend and publisher Robert Giroux, the book appeared in 1971 and won the National Book Award for fiction the following year, a rare posthumous honor.