This gem for the FSG edition of the complete stories of Flannery O’Connor is one of the best, most beautiful, most appropriate book covers ever.
Flannery O'Connor
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This gem for the FSG edition of the complete stories of Flannery O’Connor is one of the best, most beautiful, most appropriate book covers ever.
I hope you don’t have friends who recommend Ayn Rand to you. The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky.
Flannery O'Connor’s unambiguous opinion of Ayn Rand in a 1960 letter to a friend.
Pair with O'Connor on why the grotesque appeals to us and the difference between religion and faith.
Flannery O'Connor on dogma, belief, and the difference between religion and faith – spectacular read
All novelists are fundamentally seekers and describers of the real, but the realism of each novelist will depend on his view of the ultimate reaches of reality.
[…]
The novelist must be characterized not by his function but by his vision, and we must remember that his vision has to be transmitted and that the limitations and blind spots of his audience will very definitely affect the way he is able to show what he sees.
Flannery O'Connor on storytelling and the heart of fiction.
There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored.
Flannery O'Connor, born on this day in 1925, on storytelling and why the grotesque appeals to us.
For Flannery O'Connor’s birthday, her little-known satirical catoons
“Everything has its testing point in the eye, and the eye is an organ that eventually involves the whole personality, and as much of the world as can be got into it.”
Flannery O'Connor’s peacocks, a fine addition to famous authors’ beloved pets.
Flannery O’Connor’s bedroom, where the author did most of her writing. The aluminum crutches shown in the photograph were to help the author walk around her ancestral farm, Andalusia, in Milledgeville, Georgia, due to systemic lupus erythematosus. While only expected to live for five more years after the diagnosis, O’Connor survived for fourteen more, completing more than two dozen short stories and two novels until her death on August 3, 1964, at the age of thirty-nine.
Flannery O’Connor reads "A Good Man is Hard to Find" in a Southern accent so delicious you could drink it
The meaning of a story should go on expanding for the reader the more he thinks about it, but meaning cannot be captured in an interpretation. If teachers are in the habit of approaching a story as if it were a research problem for which any answer is believable so long as it is not obvious, then I think students will never learn to enjoy fiction. Too much interpretation is certainly worse than too little, and where feeling for a story is absent, theory will not supply it.
My tone is not meant to be obnoxious. I am in a state of shock.
Flannery O'Connor responds to a school teacher’s odd take on A Good Man Is Hard to Find, offering some timeless broader insight on storytelling and interpretation in the process.
Susan Sontag put it even more forcefully: “Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling… Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world.”