Will I love A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories?

O’Connor’s stories reveal good and evil as clearly as if viewed by a jeweler—through the loupe.

What she observed in the world around her, she expressed with clarity, and such reflections are not easily absorbed.  They are deep and sometimes horrifying. Sometimes she actually made me uncomfortable by forcing me to feel slight touches of... perhaps not evil, but malicious or malevolent impulses residing in much of mankind.

Strange, too, is her ability to show irony and amusement in the great human comedy. I find her stories impossible to turn away from.

This classic short story by Flannery O'Connor follows a family on a road trip through the South.

Included on the journey is the manipulative and deceitful grandmother, who somehow convinces the family to take a detour to visit an old plantation home that she remembers from her childhood. The consequences of this detour are chilling.

Spoiler alert, but in the context of the ongoing investigations of our former President, one of the passages really struck a chord, “I found out the crime don't matter. You can do one thing or you can do another, kill a man or take a… show more.

Flannery O'Connor isolates a part of the world and looks to make it her own literary discovery, by telling very careful, amused, and well-judged short stories about evil, weakness, and stupidity, without losing sight of the value of goodness, however much her characters are punished for flirting with it. Despite her literary creations often falling short of human decency, she deploys them with a patient benevolence and affection that is akin to the way I hope God sees us all. This collection of short stories taught me that providing a reader can see the story through your character's eyes, they… show more.

Southern Gothic is that purely American literary tradition that draws its power from the land, its ghosts, and the people and personalities that populate its unique geography, and none have done it better than O’Connor. Her cogent commentaries on the foibles, weaknesses, and grotesqueries of the human condition are biting and astute as she effortlessly weaves humor into the darkest of tales. She lays open each character with a razor-sharp filet knife, showing everything squirming and hiding inside. The deeply disturbing title piece stands in my top five short stories ever penned (the top spot claimed by Shirley Jackson’s The… show more.