The Complete Stories: (Centennial Edition)

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