The Complete Stories

Winner of the National Book Award

Flannery O'Connor's The Complete Stories is the essential volume for admirers of this master of the short for--now with a foreword by Hilton Als.

In these sly, laconic, and fiercely observed works, O'Connor does nothing less than elaborate a unique and new way of seeing the world. Contorting her sharply drawn characters through her Southern Gothic prism, she produces a panorama unequaled in its vision of the interplays of faith, evil, humor, violence, and compassion that embody American life.

These thirty-one chronologically ordered stories include twelve that do not appear in the only two story collections O'Connor put together in her short lifetime--Everything That Rises Must Converge and A Good Man Is Hard to Find.

Taken together, these stories reveal O'Connor's abiding and visionary gift--one that has given us some of the most powerful and disturbing fiction of the twentieth century. Also included is an introduction by O'Connor's longtime editor and friend, Robert Giroux. New to this centennial edition is an essay by the critic Hilton Als.

"What we lost when she died is bitter. What we have is astonishing: the stories burn brighter than ever, and strike deeper." --Walter Clemons, Newsweek

Flannery O'Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1925. When she died at the age of thirty-nine, America lost one of its most gifted writers at the height of her powers. O'Connor wrote two novels, Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960), and two story collections, A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955) and Everything That Rises Must Converge (1964). Her Complete Stories, published posthumously in 1972, won the National Book Award that year. Her essays were published in Mystery and Manners (1969) and her letters in The Habit of Being (1979). She lived most of her adult life on her family's ancestral farm, Andalusia, outside Milledgeville, Georgia.

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