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Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

by Flannery O'Connor, Robert Fitzgerald (Editor), Sally Fitzgerald (Editor)

4.28 of 5 stars 4.28 · rating details · 1,415 ratings · 146 reviews

At her death in 1964, O'Connor left behind a body of unpublished essays and lectures as well as a number of critical articles that had appeared in scattered publications during her too-short lifetime. The keen writings comprising Mystery and Manners, selected and edited by O'Connor's lifelong friends Sally and Robert Fitzgerald, are characterized by the directness and simp...more

Paperback, 237 pages

Published 1970 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (first published 1969)

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Oct 24, 2012 Richard rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to Richard by: Mark

Shelves: american-literature, recs-by-friends, southern-literature, literary-theory, reviewed, by-women, 2012

This book of essays gives us some of Flannery O'Connor's thoughts about what it was like for her to be a Catholic writer in the American South. Her writing shows the personality of someone who is confident of her own experience and ability, and yet (at least most of the time) quite humble about it too.

O'Connor writes with wit (ranging from wry humour to sarcasm) about the incomprehension or disapproval with which her short stories and novels were met by many contemporary readers. She stresses t...more This book of essays gives us some of Flannery O'Connor's thoughts about what it was like for her to be a Catholic writer in the American South. Her writing shows the personality of someone who is confident of her own experience and ability, and yet (at least most of the time) quite humble about it too.

O'Connor writes with wit (ranging from wry humour to sarcasm) about the incomprehension or disapproval with which her short stories and novels were met by many contemporary readers. She stresses the importance of writing which is based on concrete details rather than on abstraction, unmediated emotions or even misdirected devotion. It is important to be true to one's vocation as a writer, and to write reality as it is, not as one would like it to be. One cannot and should not reduce reading to the extraction of handy themes or morals. And one should not reduce the writing process to the application of techniques and formulae. As a Southerner, says O'Connor, it is vital to be grounded in the region, history and customs which make the writer what he or she is. She also deals with the difficulties of teaching, understanding and reading literature which are caused by the general decline of the spiritual worldview in society.

She has intriguing things to say about being a Catholic trying to write in accordance with the fundamentals of Catholic doctrine and spirituality while still being true to one's mission as a writer. This is a delicate balancing act, often made more complicated by the surrounding Bible Belt. (Interestingly, she says that this consideration of Protestantism is not all counterproductive and does not need to be entirely defensive or antagonistic!)

While I didn't agree with absolutely everything O'Connor said, I think this is a valuable book for any serious writer or reader. O'Connor had a high opinion of the writer's calling and a serious spiritual vision, yet she was able to look at life with humour and to remain firmly grounded in the Southern world from which she sprang. (less)

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Apr 06, 2013 Lee rated it 4 of 5 stars

Ms. O'Connor sometimes seems to me like a didactic pedantic generalizer, but in general I like her. Flat-out loved the opening peacock essay and wish there were more slice of essayistic life in here to complement the must-read/essential essays that reveal her as a literary fundamentalist, albeit one whose ideation be animated by denominational spirits, a religiousity that's maybe her strength and weakness in this collection, as in the story collection I read earlier this year (A Good Man Is Hard ...more Ms. O'Connor sometimes seems to me like a didactic pedantic generalizer, but in general I like her. Flat-out loved the opening peacock essay and wish there were more slice of essayistic life in here to complement the must-read/essential essays that reveal her as a literary fundamentalist, albeit one whose ideation be animated by denominational spirits, a religiousity that's maybe her strength and weakness in this collection, as in the story collection I read earlier this year (A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories). My reaction to her stories and essays seems consistently polarized -- either I love a story or essay, fly through it, swim in it, revel in it, fully engage with it, or else it closes down and becomes an impenetrable thicket of text, dull, inflexible, too parochial for this fancy northeastern prep school kid. In this collection, the essays about Catholic writers and the memoir about the little girl who died at age 9 were not accessible to this 21st century pagan (literary pantheist, to be exact). In general throughout I jibed with her when she talked about the anti-scientific mysteries of fiction writing, the mysticism of it, but when she deploys a lot of "musts" and "shoulds" when talking about fiction, although at one point she does say there're no rules as long as you can pull it off (although few pull much off), she loses me, since I guess I just don't respond to what seems to me like this sort of mild-mannered effectively totalitarian sensibility (reminded me of Marilynne Robinson somewhat), especially when it comes to art. Too often for me seemed intellectually dualistic (good vs evil) in a way I don't believe accurately reflects what it's like to be alive. For an engaging story, an evil obstacle (a dragon!) on the way to the Kingdom of Souls might work wonders for readers, but then it seems a little rote, too, even if the ultimate goal is a sense of mystery/redemption? In general, I enjoyed reading most of this, even if I didn't agree with it all, to such an extent that I give it four stars even if I skimmed the last few essays. Awesome to see where so many of those writing workshop old standbys come from: a story needs a beginning, middle, and end, if not necessarily in that order, etc. Also interesting re: what she has to say about teaching writing in college at the end of "The Nature and Aim of Fiction": "In the last twenty years the colleges have been emphasizing creative writing to such an extent that you almost feel that any idiot with a nickel's worth of talent can emerge from a writing class able to write a competent story. In fact, so many people can now write competent stories that the short story as a medium is in danger of dying of competence. We want competence, but competence by itself is deadly. What is needed is the vision to go with it, and you do not get this from a writing class." (Again, Matthew, no offense to your grandma!)(less)

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Dec 08, 2011 Jeremy added it

Shelves: non-fiction-about-language

The first few sections in this are really killer. O'Connor has this down to earth, conversational way of talking about fiction and how it works. Her voice comes through in a lot of these pieces just as strongly as it does in her fiction. And what's more, she compellingly offers an idea of why fiction (or at least good fiction), with its willingness to present us with the profundities of human action instead of cheap, sentimental, reductive crap, is an essential form of expression. Unfortunately,...more

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Nov 03, 2011 Taka rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: iu-fall-2011, writing_reference

In reading Flannery O’Connor’s Mystery and Manners, I was inspired and found so many things relevant to my situation as a writer and teacher. I will respond to her book in two parts, first from the standpoint of a teacher and second from that of a fiction writer.

One of the tips that may be useful in teaching creative writing is her insistence that fiction must, before all else, be concrete and appeal to the senses. One of my students likes to write abstractly because, he says, it will allow diff...more In reading Flannery O’Connor’s Mystery and Manners, I was inspired and found so many things relevant to my situation as a writer and teacher. I will respond to her book in two parts, first from the standpoint of a teacher and second from that of a fiction writer.

One of the tips that may be useful in teaching creative writing is her insistence that fiction must, before all else, be concrete and appeal to the senses. One of my students likes to write abstractly because, he says, it will allow different people to see what they want to see. I told him that’s probably an ineffective way of writing and gave him James Joyce’s quote: “In the particular is contained the universal.” In fact, one thing I want my students to take away from my class is writing concretely, whether in fiction or poetry.

Another point that is personally relevant to me is O’Connor’s claim that students need to learn tools to understand a story. After a disastrous class on characterization where I presented the tools of characterization to my students at the end of the class, I decided to do another lesson on the topic. I started with a simple question, “Why do we read in a creative writing class?” They responded with “So we can steal from them,” which allowed me to tell them we were going to read that week’s story and look at what the author is doing at the level of craft so they can learn how to do the same. And this time, I gave them the tools first and went over the story paragraph by paragraph, reminding them to keep the tools in mind and asking them what they learned about the characters in each paragraph. I also had them build an interesting character using the tools, and I hope that class was a lot more successful in teaching my students the tools than the first one.

Going back to O’Connor, I also agree with her assessment that workshops, especially undergraduate ones, tend to be “composed in equal part of ignorance, flattery, and spite” (86). Though I haven’t seen “spite” in the workshops I ran, I have seen my student finish “workshopping” one another’s work after ten to twenty minutes. And sadly, some of those elements—especially flattery—remain in graduate-level workshops.

Now as a writer, I strongly disagree with O’Connor’s belief that fiction writing is a gift, or as she puts it, “If you have it in the first place, you can develop it; if you don’t have it, you might as well forget it” (88). Like Anthony Johnston, I don’t believe in talent, and I highly doubt I could have been born with any innate ability to write fiction in English.

This notwithstanding, I found most of her essays to be germane to me as a writer. First, I was inspired by her definition of fiction: “A story is a way of saying something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is… The meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning but experienced meaning” (96). Now, this made me think of Zen’s concept of art, where art aims to achieve maximal effect with minimal means, which is something I aspire to in all of my work.

Second, something I have been thinking about a lot lately is the relationship between the conscious and unconscious mind in writing, and she drives home the idea that jibes with my experience as reflected in my analogy of a sculpture in response to Madison Smartt Bell: “The time to think of technique is when you’ve actually got the story in front of you” (102). Elsewhere, she makes the point that too much competent alone is harmful because you need vision to go with it, and vision is something you can get only from the unconscious mind. Being too self-conscious of technique when writing a first draft, I think, kills any vision that the unconscious mind is trying to communicate to you, and that’s why O’Connor says, “One thing that is always with the writer—no matter how long he has written or how good he is—is the continuing process of learning how to write” (83). This is exactly something I’ve been experiencing with my own work. Every time I start a new story, contrary to my expectations, it’s never easier. If anything, it’s harder. I’m constantly wincing at humdrum descriptions and the flatness of the plot and fighting the impulse to edit. Each story presents its peculiar difficulties and I have to learn how to render those into credible scenes. Also, because technique comes after the first draft, finishing the first draft is always a learning experience.

Third, I’ve been drawn to stories with natural disasters in them (earthquake, tsunami, rockfall in a tunnel, etc.), and her claim about the role of violence in her fiction explained my fascination with crises and how they could be viewed: “With the serious writer, violence is never an end in itself. It is the extreme situation that best reveals what we are essentially” (113). This way of thinking about my fascination with natural disasters made me realize that although they have never been just ends in themselves, I could do so much more with them. O’Connor helped me understand what I’ve been trying to do unconsciously: getting to the essence of who the characters are. This was a valuable realization.

Finally, her remark about the relationship between craft and depth really struck a chord in me: “This is not to say that [the novelist] doesn’t have to be concerned with adequate motivation or accurate references or a right theology; he does; but he has to be concerned with these only because the meaning of his story does not begin except at a depth where these things are exhausted” (153). This last bit came to me almost as a shock because it seemed to me that all I have been doing is to get to that point, but, I realized, not past it. In other words, I was going deep enough. This realization made me want to go back to my old stories and really get to that depth she is talking about, because I think I have an inkling of what she’s talking about and I have a few stories that I can see going deeper with. So perhaps the biggest gain from reading Mystery and Manners is that it made me want to approach the revision process with a whole lot more artistic rigor and vision.(less)

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Jul 26, 2011 Cheri rated it 5 of 5 stars

One of the most startling things about this posthumous collection of lectures and essays is to realize just how young Flannery O'Conner was when she died. Before age 39 she possessed more brazen confidence and piercing understanding of literary craft than I ever hope to achieve. Plus, her writing is full of style and personality, wit and a no-nonsense attitude.

If I tried to sum up O'Conner's take on how to write well, it might go like this: soak yourself in the "manners"--the daily actions, cust...more

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Mar 12, 2010 Matthew rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2010

O'Connor averred that she wrote as she did because she was Catholic, and that, as a Catholic, she couldn't write any other way. She may have most readily identified herself as a Catholic, but this collection is proof positive that she was first and foremost a writer. As a critic, she was an apostle of Henry James, deeply unsentimental (indeed, a hilariously unapologetic misopedist), an enemy of excess, a believer in humility ("the first product of self-knowledge"), and, above all, gloriously quo...more

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May 08, 2013 Sheri-lee rated it 3 of 5 stars

Hmmm...there were parts that I 'really liked' but some other parts not so much, hence the 3 rating. Egocentrism? Not sure if it applies in the full sense of the word, but there is some sense of arrogance here? I have some issues with 'The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South'...the word Christian being 'no longer reliable' when she is differentiating Catholic literature-ish. And then this little passage (speaking about writing from a Catholic point of view within the context of American geo...more

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Jun 20, 2012 Sean rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: essays

I'm always leery of posthumous collections of writing, especially when they're described as "uncollected occasional prose." This particular book contains a mish-mash of speeches, student workshop presentations, odd ruminations on Catholic fiction writers and their readers, and the standout essay at the beginning, "The King of the Birds." I would've been happy if I'd stopped after that one. But instead I plodded on, skipping over quite a bit, hoping for another winner that never came. O'Connor do...more

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Feb 29, 2012 Kevin rated it 4 of 5 stars

With this collection of essays O'conner solidified my belief in the concrete. For both of us there is no such thing as writing a story so as to communicate some kind of philosophy--especially for the novice. There is only writing a story which by virtue of its having an author has a philosophy. If ideas are going to be communicated, they are going to be through the concrete. Ahab has his whale, Raskolnikov his ax, but to tell a story abstract object first is to fail to tell a story at all. Volta...more

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Aug 02, 2007 Stephen Knezovich rated it 4 of 5 stars

O'Connor breaks down the art of fiction writing. Lots of wit and insight, but for me, the religious stuff drags a bit.

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Jul 05, 2011 Angela rated it 5 of 5 stars

How is it I've lived almost four decades and haven't read this book yet? I've always loved O'Connor's short fiction and recognized her genius, but these collected essays--all written (or, in the case of speeches, delivered) when she was younger than I am now--simply thrilled me with their insight, humor, and piercing vision. The last few sections of the book that focused on writing as a Catholic were particularly valuable: I saw so many parallels between the Catholic writing community, as well a...more

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Feb 15, 2010 Craig Amason rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: top-shelf, favorites

We should never be lured into the trap of accepting ONLY what an author has to say about the interpretation of her work. At the same time, we should pay special attention to such commentary as it reveals as much about the writer as it does about the art. As an orthodox Roman Catholic living in the South, O'Connor has much to tell us in this collection of essays about displacement, isolation, discipline, faith, craftsmanship, and the vocation of writing. Some of the most memorable quotes from O'C...more

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Jan 18, 2013 NT McQueen rated it 3 of 5 stars

More like 3.5 than a 3. She has some great insights into the nature and mystery of fiction writing, however, two aspects of these essays bother me:
1) Her focus on Southern fiction writing is so specific, those who are neither from the South nor interested in Southern fiction will probably find those essays unhelpful.
2) By the last essay, redundancy sets in and all the sagacity of the first several essays is merely regurgitated with a new subject in later essays.

Overall, a good book for writers i...more

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Nov 20, 2012 Timmy rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: united-states

Her specific commentary on Catholicism (as distinct from a more general anti-secularism which she absolutely nails) is generally the weakest part for me, but her sharp eye on writing, education, human nature, and both the South and the nation in general shouldn't be overlooked. There is a reason her stories have such depth; behind them lies a woman who is thoughtful, intelligent, confident, critical, and above all, a great believer in the mystery of existence. If that doesn't reach a reader of h...more

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Jun 05, 2012 Will rated it 4 of 5 stars

An excellent volume for anyone wanting to understand how O'Connor approaches writing, art, and religion. The essays are also plain fun to read. She has a great wit and writes without any pretense. It is so refreshing to encounter such intelligence devoid of jargon or arrogance.

"The Fiction Writer and His Country" and "Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction" are especially good.

Despite not being Catholic myself, I have great sympathy for a number of her views, including the presence of...more

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Jun 11, 2010 Lorrie rated it 4 of 5 stars

O'Connor says, "I have found, in short, from reading my own writing, that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory held largely by the devil. I have also found that what I write is read by an audience which puts little stock in either grace or the devil." (118)

These lectures and essays allow us to hear her voice and her heart.

I think "Total Effect and the Eighth Grade" is brilliant. I would love to use it as a springboard for discussion among educations from various contexts -...more

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Jul 30, 2012 Becky Pliego rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: read-in-2012, on-writing, favorites, literary

This is a must read for all those who want to be able to fully understand O'Connor's short stories. After reading this book, I have no doubt that Flannery O'Connnor is not only and amazing writer, but one who truly understands sin and redemption.

A few of my favorite quotes:

"I have heard it said that belief in Christian dogma is a hindrance to the writer, but I myself have found nothing further from the truth. Actually, it frees the storyteller to observe. It is not a set of rules which fixes wh...more

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Feb 26, 2012 Patrick Todoroff rated it 4 of 5 stars

If you’ve hung around forums and websites for Christian fiction writers, you’ve no doubt bumped into a recurring set of discussions:

What are a faith-based writer’s obligations before God?
How theologically-correct does a story have to be? How evangelistic?
How realistic can the depictions of a fallen world and unsaved characters be?
Where exactly is the line for profanity? violence? pornography?
When does it slip into being gratuitous and become a stumbling block?

Vital questions to be sure, and ones...more

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Jul 02, 2012 Charles rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: the-recusancy, writing, catholic, 20th-century, summer-2012, favorites

I cannot recommend this book highly enough. If I had the financial means to put this on every reader's bookshelf I would. So I will do my best with literary means- words. Here are the first seven reasons for reading this book that came to mind.

1. You will return to (or arrive at for the first time, in which case you're in for a powerful and wonderful ride) her short stories with a deeper appreciation.

[Full disclosure: when I first picked up O'Connor's fiction I could not see why so many people...more

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May 17, 2013 Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: books-on-writing

I'm kicking myself for not reading MYSTERY AND MANNERS years ago. Flannery O'Connor is a fiction writer, I told myself; what could she teach me about spiritual memoir writing? And yet some of these are the best essays I've ever read about addressing the spiritual life in prose.

If a writer is any good, what he makes will have its source in a realm much larger than that which his conscious mind can encompass and will always be a greater surprise to him than it can ever be to his reader.
--Flanner...more I'm kicking myself for not reading MYSTERY AND MANNERS years ago. Flannery O'Connor is a fiction writer, I told myself; what could she teach me about spiritual memoir writing? And yet some of these are the best essays I've ever read about addressing the spiritual life in prose.

If a writer is any good, what he makes will have its source in a realm much larger than that which his conscious mind can encompass and will always be a greater surprise to him than it can ever be to his reader.
--Flannery O’Connor, Mystery & Manners, 83.

The point O'Connor emphasizes repeatedly is that only a writer's adherence to reality, in its sensory, concrete details, can make the supernatural apparent. The universal is in the particular; the supernatural is in the natural. I knew this. But where she challenges me is when she discusses the skepticism of modern readers, and how a writer of faith must at times exaggerate to make his or her point:

The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural. … When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock—to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.
--Flannery O’Connor, Mystery & Manners, 33.

How do we do this in memoir, or essays? I'm curious to explore this.

I also love O'Connor's perspective that her faith, rather than diminish the terrain of her content or the breadth of her perspective, actually demands more of her craft. Good writing addresses the farthest reaches of mystery, O'Connor says, and faith requires us to live in relationship with this mystery in every moment--or, more to her point, with every mundane detail of our days. In a literary world so often devoid of believers, O'Connor is a must-read.(less)

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Nov 03, 2009 Cassy rated it 3 of 5 stars

Recommended to Cassy by: Creative Writing Professor R. Liddell

Shelves: 2009, physical-own, theme-books-and-writing, non-fiction-general

This is a collection of essays and speeches complied after O’Connor’s death. It is divided into six parts. I thought I’d organize my review accordingly.

I. A Short Story – very entertaining. I am glad the editors included this story among all the essays. I had never read any of her short stories or novels. This established my respect for her talent.

II. Southern Literature – fairly interesting, although maybe obsolete. I had not really realized that there was such a genre, which is pretty sad sinc...more

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Sep 29, 2008 Heather rated it 5 of 5 stars

Who knew an isolated lupus-suffering hyper-religious Catholic in the smack middle of Georgia could be so hot damn funny!

Seriously, a victory.

I think what makes Flannery O'Connor's aesthetic so brilliant is its combination of two themes: what she calls the "violent" and the "comic." Her literature, like her essays, is both funny and deeply, unabashedly brutal. For O'Connor writing, like reading, isn't a science or an exercise in sentimentality. We don't -and shouldn't- read for enjoyment. We read...more

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May 06, 2008 Steven rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: writing

So much great advice in these essays, and O'Connor is so quotable. Much easier to quote than to emulate. On this reading I took the time to read the four essays—which I'd previously skipped—relating to the writer and religion and was surprised to find embedded in there some otherwise sound advice that even a non-catholic writer could put to use. For the most part, though, those four essays seemed to be aimed at critics of her religious bent, or at writers such as Sartre and Camus, as in this bit...more

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Dec 19, 2007 Felicity rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: fiction writers

Shelves: grad-school, writing-craft, essays, nonfiction

This is an excellent book about fiction, why (in one practitioner's opinion) to write it, read it, and value it. Flannery O'Connor has a matter-of-fact approach to big topics like the philosophy of art, and suffers neither fools nor mediocrity. This collection of her lectures and essays is so pithy that I was often moved to jot down quotes for later use. Some of these follow my review.

The last part of the volume, which concerns being a Catholic writer, writing the Catholic novel, et cetera, is o...more

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Feb 18, 2011 Amy rated it 5 of 5 stars

Indispensable. Flannery O'Connor's post-humously collected essays and discussions on Southern writers, the Catholic writer, and her own work has taught me more about writing than all the craft books I've read of late. Her candid attitude toward theory and meaning, namely, that if the writer has direction, has motive, the meaning will reveal itself in the story with no need for theory (or academia).

For lovers of O'Connor's work, this collection sheds much light on where the writer was coming fro...more

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Jun 06, 2010 Kaylee rated it 3 of 5 stars

I love Flannery O'Connor's fiction, so when I discovered I still hadn't read this book six years after I bought it for a class as "supplementary material", I got excited.

Turns out I should have only been partly excited. O'Connor is predictably opinionated about all the topics within this book. For the most part, that wasn't a problem for me. I like her no-false-modesty stance on why she wrote ("because I'm good at it"); I like her annoyance at the idea that writing can be taught ("if it's not na...more

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Sep 30, 2008 Mary rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: writers

Recommended to Mary by: no one

I have long been a fan of Flannery O'Connor's fiction but I had not read her non-fiction or essays until two months ago. She may have died over 40 years ago, but her take on the writing scene and the nature of writing is accurate--it as though she wrote it recently. As a former Catholic, I do understand her religious and spiritual references. If those give pause to some readers, I would still recommend the book for its clear-eyed, non-sentimental look at the education in America and why the work...more

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Sep 27, 2009 Seán rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2009

For the kids:

Most of us have learned to be dispassionate about evil, to look it in the face and find, as often as not, our own grinning reflections with which we do not argue, but good is another matter. Few have stared at that long enough to accept the fact that its face too is grotesque, that in us the good is something under construction. The modes of good have to be satisfied with a cliche or a smoothing-down that will soften their real look.

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Apr 01, 2009 Mary rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: classics, essays, spirituality

I love this book. It's Flannery O'Connor at her best, her nonfiction best, that is: wry, funny, and razor sharp. I can't believe she died when she was 39; or, more specifically, I can't believe she could write all she did, know all she did and live it all before age 40. Remarkable. God had a hold on her.

This book is a collection of O'Connor's speeches, some excerpts from letters and essays she wrote. She's relentless in her commentary/critique of bad--sentimental--art and laziness. And she's exh...more

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Feb 27, 2010 hirtho rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: oconnor

2/27 - I actually finished this Wednesday but I've been busy since then (thankfully).

The essays in the middle are the best, while I did enjoy the last few cuz of my recent interest in Catholocism, I'm sot sure if they say anything not already better-said in the previous ones. The beginnings one were sorta whatever to me, I should re-read her stuff that I am (think I am?) a Real Reader

2/20 - she's pretty cranky! i like it!!!

2/18 - I skimmed/skipped most of the "southern writer/fiction" stuff at t...more

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About Flannery O'Connor

Mary Flannery O'Connor was an American novelist, short-story writer and essayist. O'Connor's writing often reflected her own Roman Catholic faith, and frequently examined questions of morality and ethics.

Her The Complete Stories received the 1972 National Book Award for Fiction. In a 2009 online poll conducted by the National Book Foundation, the collection was named the best work to have won the...more

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A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories

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BBCode	[url=http://discovereads.com/book/show/75087.Mystery_and_Manners?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book][img]http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1330499787l/75087.jpg[/img][/url] [url=http://discovereads.com/book/show/75087.Mystery_and_Manners?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book]Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose by Flannery O'Connor[/url]

Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

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