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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
109 of 116 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A great artist, a noble soul!,
This is perhaps the most beautiful edition of the collected works of Flannery O'Connor. And it contains not only her incomparable stories--with those unforgettable characters!--but her magnificent letters. Her stories can both shock and shine. Her letters have made me both laugh and cry. Her stories never grow old--I've read them over many years now and am always finding something new and fresh and am always in awe of her consummate artistry. And her letter reveal, at least in part, the secret of her art and the power of her stories: they reveal a noble soul. Humble, honest, caring, suffering, and always, a valiant woman of faith. Her lupus stimied her activity; but it deepened her spirit and heart. I am sure those peacocks she loved so much missed her. And they're not fortunate enough, like us, to be able to read her relatively slim, but always enriching, literary legacy. GET THIS BOOK!
100 of 112 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
brilliant stories in a flawed edition,
The stories themselves easily get a five. O'Connor was a genius, combining her Catholicism, her Southern-ness, and the grotesque in stories that explore the nature of revelation, grace (or the lack thereof), and redemption. The stories have characters who are often "freaks"-physically (legless, armless, fat, pock-marked) and psychologically. Frequently, the stories are violent, shockingly so; and if not violent, then they still surprise or shock us in some way. My jaw has hit the floor reading each story. But they are meant to startle us into our own revelation. It requires patience and careful reading and re-reading to get to the heart of O'Connor's writing, but it's well worth the effort.The collection itself gets, at best, a two. It is very poorly organized, as others have mentioned. Rather than a table of contents listing every story, the main table of contents lists only "major" works-that is, the novels (Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away) and the collections (A Good Man Is Hard To Find and Everything That Rises Must Converge). To find a particular story, one must either know what collection it appears in or must check separate tables of contents within the book. I'm probably nitpicking, but it can be frustrating, especially for someone new to O'Connor. The included essays are O'Connors most well-known and provide important and interesting insights into her writing and themes. Many of the letters are intriguing, but many others consist of a few lines and are not extremely useful (there's a two-line letter to Walker Percy, congratulating him on an award, which tells us virtually nothing at all; include it in a book of O'Connor's letters but not in a sampling of her best and most important). Beyond that, the letters are very poorly indexed. Sometimes, an index entry refers the reader to a page with no reference to the topic; other times, an entry lists, say, two references, whereas there are actually three or four among the letters. It's wonderful to have all this under one cover, but I wish they'd have taken just a bit more time to produce a better volume.
16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
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