Stories of Flannery O’Connor (1925–64). Full of violence, mordant comedy, and a fierce Catholic vision that is bent on human salvation at any cost, Flannery O’Connor’s stories are like no others. Bigots, intellectual snobs, shyster preachers, and crazed religious seers—a full cavalcade of what critics came to call “grotesques”—careen through her tales, and O’Connor gleefully displays the moral inadequacy of all of them. Twentieth-century short stories often focus on tiny moments, but O’Connor’s stories, with their unswerving eye for vanity and their profound sense of the sacred, feel immense.
Total Points: 83 (JLB 6) (JC 1) (MCunn 1) (CE 5) (CH 2) (BH 7) (KH 4) (JHUMP 3) (WK 10) (WL 2) (BM 1) (DMcF 7) (EM 1) (MM 4) (RRash 3) (JS 4) (PShreve 4) (LS 4) (DWall 4) (BW 10)