The Complete Stories: (Centennial Edition)

by Flannery O'Connor, Hilton Als (Foreword by), Robert Giroux (Introduction)

Overview

Winner of the National Book Award

Now with a new introduction from Hilton Als and a redesigned cover, Flannery O’Connor’s The Complete Stories is the essential collection of this legendary author’s most infamous works.

This is the essential volume of the stories of Flannery O’Connor.

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 a foreword by the critic Hilton Als.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250387455
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	03/25/2025
Series:	FSG Classics
Pages:	576
Product dimensions:	5.38(w) x 8.25(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

Introduction by Robert Giroux

The Geranium

The Barber

Wildcat

The Crop

The Turkey

The Train

The Peeler

The Heart of the Park

A Stroke of Good Fortune

Enoch and the Gorilla

A Good Man Is Hard to Find

A Late Encounter with the Enemy

The Life You Save May Be Your Own

The River

A Circle in the Fire

The Displaced Person

A Temple of the Holy Ghost

The Artificial Nigger

Good Country People

You Can't Be Any Poorer Than Dead

Greenleaf

A View of the Woods

The Enduring Chill

The Comforts of Home

Everything That Rises Must Converge

The Partridge Festival

The Lame Shall Enter First

Why Do the Heathen Rage?

Revelation

Parker's Back

Judgement Day

Editorial Reviews

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

From the Publisher