Product Description
In these twelve intelligent tales, seasoned poet and story writer Gary Fincke reconciles lost hope and quiet despair with small blessings and ultimate redemption. In his world, as easily as one man becomes a hero, another is riddled with failure. Fincke weaves together the large and small tragedies of daily life to create an inescapable, yet at times oddly comforting, reality. His characters inhabit a world of strip malls and fast-food joints, low-down jobs and physical ailments, lottery tickets and cheap beer. Here, everyone and everything is suspicious, and only the luck of the draw determines who, if anyone, will survive.

In the title story, Ben, a fifty-year-old bookstore clerk facing the possibility of prostate cancer, feels his life spiraling out of control as he endures his female doctor's examinations with childlike embarrassment on the one hand and struggles to conceal his age from his teenybopper coworkers on the other. Ben's only consolation is that "every day he heard about something a hundred times worse." In "Gatsby, Tender, Paradise," Bridgeford encounters a group of lightning strike and electrocution victims and feels lucky to have survived several light-switch shocks--the same type of shocks that have permanently disabled one man in the group. Such are the small but important blessings that ultimately rescue Fincke's characters from despair. Here at last is someone who can articulate both our constant, mortal desire to transcend ordinary experience and our simultaneous comfort in the unremarkable and familiar. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

One of America's Best Kept Literary Secrets
Gary Fincke's Sorry I Worried You won the Flannery O' Connor Award for good reason. If anything, Fincke is a chronicler of everyday life, of burger joints and strip malls, of lives that often go unnoticed in many writers' hands yet exist all around us in present day America. In the tradition of writers like Raymond Carver and Richard Yates, Fincke uses the desperation of the mundane as inspiration. He doesn't rely on cheap tricks. There's no melodrama or experimentation here. Instead, what you get is straightforward realism that's more interested in character than plot. And his prose pops on every page, reflecting his background as a poet. If you're in the market for a collection of technically flawless, unpretentious stories of middle class anxiety, this is the book for you.

Sorry I Bored You
They really should retitle this book.If you're a literary fiction enthusiast and you love well written stories that have no point, this collection is for you.

If, however, you actually expect an ending to go with the set-up well, with this book you're out of luck.

... Read more

Product Description

Customer Reviews (2)

Northern Cliched, Unenlightened View of Difficult Writer
Coles book adds almost nothing to an ordinary reader's opinions on O'Connor's works. It fails utterly to discover, much less analyze, why her stories are so good. It is classic condescension from a man unqualified to discuss O'Connor's works, much less than evaluate them. Coles is the classic Northern know it all, so despised, and rightfully so, by Walker Percy, undoubtedly the most underrated and underead Southern novelist of our times. For most academic elites, O'Connor and Percy and to a lesser extent Faulkner (with Faulkner northern and non-Southern writers from France and Britain, for example, stereotype the South which they don't bother to understand and simply ignore Faulkner because they don't know how to deal with probably finest fiction writer of the twentieth century--James Joyce's and Beckett's works, except for Beckett's trilogy and Waiting for Godot, are praised by the "in critics" but seldom understood. Only Hugh Kenner was able to make BEckett respectable, but he wrote little on Ulysses and seemed to realize that Joyce was simply not the great writer, applauded but not read.Kenner's failure to discuss Faulkner or O'Connor were serious lapses by the finest critic of 20th century lit. Only with Pound did Kenner have a subject worthy of his critical genius.In any event Coles's book lacks the necessary understanding of the "real" south because of his rather shallow philosophy and his f ailure to do the necessary research that would have enabled him to write at least a passable book on O'Connor.

I should note that the hugely over-praised Raymond Carver wrote superficial fiction that was easily accessible to anyone with a high school education. Like Lowell in poetry compared to E.Bishop,, Carver's reputation will fade (has already faded) while O'Connor's work continues to grow in popluarity and in intelligent critical applause. It is certainly a cliche, but O' Connor's work speaks for itself and defies summary and analysis.Many people prefer her letters, which like Waugh's and Keats's are great reading, but they don't substitute for these writers works. Like Waugh, a conservative satirist and genius prose stylist, O' Connor's stories and two novels should be read and discussed orally in reading groups--written critiques simply can't explain the themes, plot and especially the characters and setting of their works. Also, of course, Faulkner, O'Connor, Bishop, and Waugh are still dismissed because they are politically incorrect and conservative, in the Burkean sense.

Discusses O'Connor's view of the 1960s South, its alienation and views she held as a Catholic, Southern intellectual...
Coles describes the "social scene" and the civil rights movement in Georgia during the early 1960s. Contrasts O'Connor's "northern reader"-- and the perspective of the South that he or she brings to a reading -- with the version of reality that O'Connor saw and portrayed in her fiction.

Discusses her view of the grotesque, her treatment of black characters, and the various philosophical and religious themes seen in her work. Provides a fairly close, but informal reading of "The Displaced Person." Sees it as reflective of the South as a region, and asserts that, through this story, O'Connor "pursued her main business of storytelling as a means of showing the depth of God's mysteries." Contends that the result is "a series of reminders about God's earth as well as His universe, [and] His Commandments," resulting in "a rare and exceedingly high kind of sociology, history, [and] social psychology."

Discusses her comment that the South's alienation was "`not alienation enough,'" and her belief that the South was finding itself forced not only out of its sins, but its "`few virtues'" as well. Considers such topics as: pride, intellectual conviction, "practical heresies, the South's "`old-time religion,'" and "backwoods fundamentalism" as seen in "Parker's Back," "Good Country People," and "The Artificial Nigger." Suggests that O'Connor's "own theological sophistication enabled her to connect the sights and sounds of back-country, southern twentieth-century life to a history that began in Christ's time, and even before."

Coles illustrates his points with lengthy explications ofO'Connor's novel, Wise Blood and her story, "Parker's Back." Regards O'Connor as a "Southern intellectual" who "steeped herself" in literature, religion, art, psychology, and in "her own sharp fashion, the South's social and political matters." Sees this background evident in "her repeated jabs at social science, psychology, theorists, and ... the entire liberal, secular world." Reads "The Lame Shall Enter First" as O'Connor's attempt "to dramatize an incompatibility she has seen about her in this modern world: intellectuals who mock traditional religion, then take a certain religious way of getting along with others."

Contrasts intellectual and spiritual knowledge in "Good Country People," "The Enduring Chill" and The Violent Bear It Away. Refers to works by Simone Weil, St. Thomas Aquinas, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and Georges Bernanos.

Concludes that O'Connor was "a writer with few peers...of enormous promise...a soul blinded by faith; hence with an uncanny endowment of sight."

R. Neil Scott / Middle Tennessee State University ... Read more

Product Description

Customer Reviews (2)

Overwhelmingly Beautiful Stories
I donated $1 to breast cancer research at the Safeway at 15th Ave E and E John on Capitol Hill. I was allowed to choose a book from a big pile on a table just outside the checkers. I saw this and thought, why not?
I was pulled into these very personal, very tight, and infinitely wise stories and the lives they exposed the minute I opened the book. A few days later I finished it, loaned it to a friend, and set about getting a copy of Ms. Glickfeld's more recent work, Swimming Toward the Ocean. I suppose all art may have some flaws, but I haven't noticed any in Carols Glickfeld's work!
I'll also review Swimming Toward the Ocean when I finish it. I feel so fortunate to have found these works.

Moving collection of short stories
Had to read this for college English, and glad I did.Moving, sad, and funny all in the same book. ... Read more

Product Description
188 previously unpublished letters between Flannery O'Connor and novelist Brainard Cheney, a fellow Roman Catholic close to the Tate circle ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Describes the friendship and provides the text of 188 letters between Flannery O'Connor and Brainard and Frances Neel Cheney...
Stephens uses his previous work on his Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Maryland in 1985 to provides O'Connor scholars with an indexed, annotated, chronological compilation of the correspondence between Flannery O'Connor and Brainard and Frances Neel Cheney. Using letters donated by Brainard Cheney to the Vanderbilt University Library, those included range from February 8, 1953 to July 16, 1964.

The volume includes a foreword by Brainard Cheney, a seventeen-page introduction by Stephens providing useful biograpical and other related details, and four appendices: Frances Neel Cheney's review of A Good Man is Hard to Find; Brainard's reviews of Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away; and, Brainard's response to an article by John Hawkes.

Stephens states that all of the 188 of the letters -- except five from O'Connor -- are presented "transcribed whole and uncut." They deal with a wide variety of topics, including: their writing projects; news of friends and family; invitations to visit and comments related to recent visits; farm news (including incidents at Andalusia); O'Connor's notes on her peacocks and other birds; and various theological discussions.

[Reviewer's note: the material deleted from three of the five letters (6, 84 and 87) relate to racial issues, while the other two (90 and 151) have a single name deleted from each. Originals are located in the "Brainard Bartwell Cheney Papers" in the Special Collections Department of the Jean and Alexander Heard Library, Vanderbilt University, (Box 6, Folders 58-62). Reader's are also referred to Terrye Newkirk's M.A. thesis, also located in Vanderbilt's Special Collections: "Cheers: Letters of Flannery O'Connor to Brainard and Frances Neel Cheney, 1953-1958."]

R. Neil Scott / Middle Tennessee State University ... Read more

Product Description
These eleven stories take us from the Czech Republic to Alaska, from Siberia to West Texas, as they stake out territories straddling the border between life and death. In the title story the usual thoroughness of an insurance claims investigator spirals into obsession when Howard learns that a beautiful, drowned policyholder was a childhood neighbor he never knew. He is left uncentered, and his wife is convinced that he is having an affair. In "How the Dead Live" Karen keeps her late father's spirit trapped in her home until her newly detected pregnancy drives her thoughts outward and forward. In "Unfinished Business" Ciri's ghost cannot forsake her previous life's routines, or the chance that even in death she might love or be loved by the living.

Gina Ochsner's interests in folklore and myth often suffuse these stories of visitations, crossings, partings, and second chances. Fears and longings, for example, are often projected onto animals such as the earthbound, ice-covered swans of the Siberian tundra in "Sixty-six Degrees North." Likewise, Ochsner's insights into history-burdened contemporary life in Eastern Europe and Russia also filter through. In "Then, Returning" a Lithuanian and a Russian sort body parts and marble fragments in a Vilnius cemetery hit by stray artillery shells. As they work, a group of American genealogy buffs approaches, filled with hope that a day among the gravestones will bring order to their family trees.

In such wildly inventive ways, Gina Ochsner gives us new means to think about how the dead remain among us and how we can find beauty and solace even in graceless times and places. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (8)

Maybe as poetry...but not so much as stories.








The author of this collection is a cheerful, cute young woman. She is funny and awfully nice. She lectured to my class once.

That being said, yeah, I have never quite understood this book. Her words, they're lovely. They fit together in new and beautiful ways.

But...the stories...they don't seem like stories. They just drift and wander in pretty words. They are a bunch of stuff that happened. Nothing to set your teeth into.

If you approach this book as poetry, you might be more satisfied with it.

One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest
Author did not understand that Russia is not a North Pole, and some Russians might read her books. The author has no knowledge about Russia, Russian names, and anything else. Of course there are some mentally disabled Russians, but the author place is also in the mental hospital.

Writing is Art
Gina Ochsner proves that writing truly is an art.

In "The Necessary Grace to Fall," Ochsner deals with the complex theme of death in even more complicated story lines that actually force the reader to think.

Ochsner writes beautifully, without veiling anything, to appeal to any person that has been touched by loss in one way or another. Her stories range from dealing with death, to the process of dying, and even experiencing life after death. Her ideas are creative and are fluidly and successfully portrayed.

I strongly recommend this book if you love to read quality literature.

Great fiction from a natural born writer
Gina Ochsner is a remarkably gifted writer who has produced a stunning first book, The Necessary Grace To Fall.These are beautifully crafted short stories, but their excellence comes primarily from Ochsner's abilities as a story-teller, skillfully juggling all of the tools of fiction to achieve the maximum impact, rather than from her ability to compose rich yet disciplined prose.She chooses her words well, but the style never gets in the way of the story and its unfolding.Her characters are complex and alive.Ochsner makes them open up on the page, and the reader comes to know them intimately as they explore their own thoughts and feelings.

Ochsner's fiction employs unusual settings, which are, for the most part, remote and exotic.Many of her stories are set in the very cold regions of the earth where the elements are extremely harsh and the inhabitants' lives are ruled by the stark realities of severe weather.In addition, her landscapes often feature prominent reminders of the forces of history that shape the characters' fates: the ruins of bombed out buildings, the exposed corpses of ethnic cleansing victims, or the cultural echoes of The Holocaust.Carefully selected sensory details bring a vivid sense of reality to these settings.You feel like you're there, breathing the air, walking the ground.In many of her stories, the setting itself acts as a character, with a life of its own, and the human characters' interior lives are inextricably interwoven with the life of the place.The reader senses that these stories couldn't have happened anywhere else other than where Ochsner placed them.

Death is a common theme in these stories, yet, they are not morbid, although at times they are gruesome.At the same time, there is much dark humor, or -- absent that -- a sense of acceptance.The stories do not have happy endings, but they aren't depressing, either.Above all, they make you think.In grim environments dominated by ice and snow, living unhappy lives where death is in the process of replacing life, and where love has been replaced by betrayal or loss, Ochsner's characters are nonetheless filled with an intense yearning that keeps them moving forward.One of the most remarkable aspects of this book is that, despite the dreadful nature of what is happening to these characters, there doesn't seem to be any bitterness in them.Rather, there is a dark wonder at the beauty of the world, even when it's at its worst.These are stories to read again and again.Very highly recommended.

The Necessary Grace to Fall
Gina Ochsner has a wonderful literary voice.This book marks the beginning of great things to come. ... Read more

Product Description
In the limbo bounded by rebellion and resignation,belonging and solitude, Ed Allen's middle Americans seem to be eitherfreely adrift or uncomfortably vested in an exit strategy whollyinadequate for their circumstances. These sixteen darkly humorousstories gauga the tension between what we really feel and what weoutwardly express, what we should do and what we manage to get done.

In "Celibacy-by-the-Atlantic," Phil negotiates a lingering, low-intensity regret brought on by the annual family get-together at his parents' beach house, where memories of his aimless, privileged adolescence mingle with forebodings of his aimless, privileged middle age. In "A Lover's Guide to Hospitals," Carl lies in bed, pining over a stillborn romance through a moody, post-op haze of painkillers.As a consoling needle through the heart, the object of Carl's unrequited affections also turns out to be his nurse.

In "Burt Osborne Rules the World," a precocious boy ponders his childhood in "a world protected against anything you could imagine doing to make it more interesting." Sensing that only more of the same awaits him as an adult, Burt charts a different course--as a class clown with a truly toxic sense of mischief. Others, like Lydia in "Ralph Goes to Mexico," assert their individuality more effortlessly, for they're just too naturally odd to be cowed by convention. Lydia's dilemma is whether she should have her leukemic cat stuffed and mounted or turned into a hat after he dies.

These lyrical tales celebrate the ordinary--and the not so ordinary--with a flourish of Nabokovian wit that combines grandeur, kitsch, and the author's broad empathy with his characters. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

The Bubble of Memory
A sad undercurrent meanders throughout Ed Allen's collection of short stories, "Ate It Anyway." The Flannery O'Connor award-winning volume for short fiction focuses on middle-class America and its failed quest for a meaningful and lasting happiness. The characters usually speak about their inner lives in a confessional-style prose. Often the protagonist will reminisce about a past that seemed so much better than it truly was.

The opening short story, "River of Toys," encloses a revealing thought, "A neighborhood is whatever anyone wants to remember about it." What makes the characters poignant is their self-knowledge of drowning in the mire of an average life they abhor. The notion is most striking in "Burt Osborne Rules the World." The short story's title soon becomes apparently oxymoronic as the character of the title's name laments, "I could have done a better job of being Burt Osborne." He peaks during sixth grade, the height of his unique individuality, and then dives headlong into mediocrity.

In short, Allen covers the terrain of an unfulfilled life like a consummate foreign correspondent. Memory turns out to be an ever-increasing bubble that holds characters within its isolated limited world of the past while pushing out the possibilities of living in the present and having any hope of a joyous future.

Bohdan Kot ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

excellent
This book does what it's supposed to do.It tells you a lot about Flannery O'Connor, her likes and dislikes, her influences, how and where she spent her time.It's not meant to be a critical study.There are plenty of those.Most readers will find here details on a fascinating creative artist whose life was cut short by illness.

This work is merely competent...
Flannery O'Connor is arguably one of the most important writers of the twentieth century.She was passionately Southern and passionately Catholic, dedicated to her craft and a consummate professional.

This is why I think she would have scorned her recent biography, written by Jean Cash.

Cash's work is merely competent.She has all the facts straight.The book is well-researched, and well documented.Cash has flipped over every O'Connor stone, but there are so few unpublished gems at this point, that the project seems to be simply one of repetition.

What makes Cash's biography especially defective is that she seems afraid to make qualitative judgments regarding O'Connor or her work.I suppose this can be good in other biographies of lesser-known literary figures.The biography falls short, in other words, precisely because of its attention to detail, and its lack of synthesis.There are times when it reads like a shopping list of O'Connor things, places, friends and relatives.Cash's prose falls lifeless into the annals of poorly-written biographies.

I only recall Cash voicing her opinion three times. She defends O'Connor's relationship with Maryat Lee as a perfectly heterosexual one.On another occasion, she defends O'Connor, who, throughout her life and private letters, made a few controversial statements regarding the Civil Rights movement: these have since tagged her as racist to some scholars.Cash also frequently asserts that O'Connor was not a reclusive person, a kind of 1950s Emily Dickenson.Of these assertions, only the second seems to have any direct bearing on her writing.It seems that her focus should have been directed to other facets of O'Connor's life.

Cash's thoughts often read like terse journal articles that have been assembled into a book as an afterthought.It is sometimes difficult to read her rather fibrous prose, which fails to synthesize multiple tellings of any particular O'Connor account into a single cohesive narrative.

Robert Fitzgerald's introduction to _Everything That Rises Must Converge_ accomplishes in about 25 pages what took Cash over 300.Besides, Fitzgerald's introduction was written by somebody who knew O'Connor, and who considered her family.But the best part about buying _Everything that Rises..._ is that instead of being forced to read a synthesis of quotes, the reader can actually look at 9 pieces of O'Connor's short fiction.

Partially Satisfactory
Better than *Publisher's Weekly* suggests, Jean Cash's life of Flannery O'Connor still it isn't all it could be. Its strengths are its fidelity to the events of O'Connor's largely unexciting life as a practicing writer and Catholic and, in this age of the doorstop biography, its modest length. Cash mines *The Habit of Being,* Sally Fitzgerald's 1979 collection of letters, and the archives she dutifully has read through. O'Connor's brilliance, orneriness, intractibility, deadpan humor, courage, honor, talent (at least by repute), and doggedness come through. In some ways, that's enough--four stars. However, one who finishes this book may still want more.

What is missing? An extended understanding of the interplay the fiction and the life, for one. Why did Hazel Motes and Julian and Tarwater and Rayber come out in just that form? When Cash discusses the connections between O'Connor's mother, Regina Cline O'Connor, and Mrs. Hopewell (in "Good Country People"), her book takes on life. More, more! Again, without naming it or discussing it at any length Cash points to the self-loathing that was the other side of O'Connor's spirituality and selflessness. The presentation needs pointing up, development.

For another, a sense of O'Connor's achievement as an artist. The fiction, which is what counts or we wouldn't be reading the life, is almost not there. My own judgment is that the two novels matter much less than and are ungainly compared to half a dozen stories, in which form perfectly embodies vision--with humor, intellectual force, and the many-sidedness of a great writer. This text needs more engagement with O'Connor's text.

Finally, Edward F. O'Connor, the father. His death, when his daughter was fifteen, surely underlies what Cash describes as the "matriarchal" world of the fiction. If it bears on Flannery O'Connor's own atrophied love life and even for her choice of *What Maisie Knew* as the work of Henry James that most interests her, those connections should be made. Cash has the facts, but the figure in the carpet needs highlighting. Otherwise, one might as well read Sally Fitzgerald's nineteen page biographical sketch at the end of the Library of America volume on O'Connor.

It is unfair to blame the author for this, but the decorative peacock feather ovals make the page numbers hard to read!

A Good Biography Is Hard to Find
Cash's FLANNERY O'CONNOR: A LIFE is a noble attempt to define and to find the Southern Catholic writer Flannery O'Connor.However, though the biography is full of facts and details about O'Connor's studies and speaking tours and friendships, it is a book that features conclusions drawn from one or two events or incidents.This problem is particularly evident, it seems, in the opening chapters about O'Connor's early years.
Another nagging problem is the frequent errors in editing or writing:extra words, missing words, odd punctuation, and a strange abundance of parentheses when a simple revision would clarify the sentences.This reviewer wonders why such mistakes coat the book like red Georgia dust.If the book ever has another edition, it will need plenty of attention to bring it up to professional standards.
It's all too bad;the basics of a good biography are there, and the subject is fascinating.
Best advice:read O'Connor's works and save the biography for occasional filler if you have the interest.

Outstanding!
This biography does what any good biography of a writer should: It invites you to run to the shelf to revisit the writer's work.As wickedly witty and charming as she was devout, Flannery O'Connor comes fully alive again in Jean Cash's careful detailing of her tragically brief life.Readers--including scholars and students--should welcome this rich portrait of the artist, particularly as it challenges some of the rampant misperceptions of O'Connor and her work. ... Read more

Product Description

Customer Reviews (2)

Descriptive review from from Flannery O'Connor: An Annotated Reference Guide to Criticism
Asals submits that his "overriding concern...is to plot out the most significant dimensions of the imagination" seen in Flannery O'Connor's works, and "to focus on her fascination with tensions and polarities."

Observes her use of startling and violent dualistic images and her debt to previous writers of the grotesque. Notes the unreconciled extremes evident in her fiction and outlines how and why these elements work so effectively. Discusses in the first chapter sources and influences for some of her early stories, including: "The Geranium," "The Turkey," "The Crop," "The Barber," "Wildcat" and "The Train."

The following three chapters focus on O'Connor's artistic practice in her more mature stories: "from close attention to texture...to examination of a crucial and recurrent pattern of character and action...to exploration of some characteristic habits of mind and the fictional strategies that embody them." Asals illustrates his points by drawing upon a variety of stories, then focuses on one story in particular for each chapter.

In the fifth chapter Asals discusses O'Connor's novel "The Violent Bear It Away," "both as a culmination of trends in her fiction after "Wise Blood" [novel] and as a significant achievement in its own right."

Outlines, in the final chapter, religious dimensions of O'Connor's imagination, focusing on her aesthetic discrimination. Maintains that inferences related to her theology "need to be determined within the larger imaginative structure of her fiction, not outside of it." Asals is dismayed to note that studies -- including his own -- seem to miss "the incorrigible sense of comedy that animates" her creations. Finds O'Connor's fiction to reflect "a world of pain dominated by the crucified, not the resurrected Christ, given over to sharp suffering and sudden death."

Adapted by R. Neil Scott from: Scott, R. Neil. FLANNERY O'CONNOR: AN ANNOTATED REFERENCE GUIDE TO CRITICISM. Milledgeville, GA: Timberlane Books, 2002. To order go to: www.TimberlaneBooks.com

The best book on O'Connor ever written!!!
I have written my MA thesis on O'Connor, and I can tell you that you will not find a better book that this one for teaching or research.Asals exploration of O'Connor is so extensive, clear and perceptive it discourages further efforts. ... Read more

Product Description
Drowning in a river, the violent murder of a grandmother in the backwoods of Georgia, the trans-genital display of a freak at a carnival show-all are shocking literary devices used by Flannery O'Connor, one of literature's best pulp-fiction writers. More than 35 years after her death, readers are still shocked by O'Connor's grotesque images. Dr. Jill Baumgaertner concentrates on O'Connor's use of emblems, those moments of sudden and horrid illumination when the sacred and the profane merge as sacrament. This readable volume is ideal for college students, O'Connor scholars, or those wishing to better understand Southern gothic fiction. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Considers Flannery O'Connor's use of visual representation, metaphors, and foreshadowing with explications of her short fiction
Baumgaertner examines Flannery O'Connor's interest in exaggerated visual representation and discusses how "sight and insight are intimately connected metaphors" in her stories.

Refers to how, "At key moments -- often at the height of a story's crisis, sometimes at a moment of foreshadowing -- O'Connor clicks the camera and catches a strange picture." Ties this technique to seventeenth-century "emblems": visual representations that "literalized a motto, epigram, or scriptural passage to provoke a new response to an old and often too familiar saying." Discusses O'Connor's stories, "The Geranium," "The Barber," "The Crop," "The Turkey," "Good Country People," "The Life You Save May Be Your Own," and "The Comforts of Home," in this context.

Considers the role of belief in the work of the Christian writer and the difficulty such writers have "in making revelatory action believable to the modern reader." Notes that "the closer and more prolonged her characters' encounters with the divine," the more frequent the appearance of emblems in O'Connor's fiction.

Offers readings of "Parker's Back," "The Lame Shall Enter First," "The Artificial Nigger," "The Displaced Person," "A Temple of the Holy Ghost," "The Enduring Chill" and "The River." Also discusses her view of the sacrament and her use of symbols and images of the Holy Ghost in this context.

Follows with biblically informed readings of "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," "A Late Encounter With the Enemy," "A View of the Woods," "A Circle in the Fire," "Everything That Rises Must Converge," "Greenleaf," and "Revelation."

Describes her novel, Wise Blood, as the story of "a modern pilgrim who does not want to progress, who is in fact more interested in moving backwards than forwards."

Explores the "allegoric and emblematic resonance in The Violent Bear It Away," noting that the three principal characters, "The Christian, the Modern Man, [and] the boy," could represent "characters from a morality play, or archetypes from mythology."

Closes with a close examination of "Judgement Day," noting that O'Connor hurried her revisions and was "still not completely satisfied with the story."

R. Neil Scott / Middle Tennessee State University
... Read more

Product Description
With a reporter's eye for the inside story and a historian's grasp of the ironies in our collective past, Greg Downs affectionately observes some of the last survivors of what Greil Marcus has called the old, weird America. Living off the map and out of sight, folks like Embee, Rudy, Peg, and Branch define themselves by where they are, not by what they eat, drink, or wear.

The man who is soon to abandon his family in "Ain't I a King, Too?" is mistaken for the populist autocrat of Louisiana, Huey P. Long-on the day after Long's assassination. In "Hope Chests," a history teacher marries his student and takes her away from a place she hated, only to find that neither one of them can fully leave it behind. An elderly man in "Snack Cakes" enlists his grandson to help distribute his belongings among his many ex-wives, living and dead. In the title story, another intergenerational family tale, a young boy is caught in a feud between his mother and grandmother. The older woman uses the language of baseball to convey her view of religion and nobility to her grandson before the boy's mother takes him away, maybe forever.

Caught up in pasts both personal and epic, Downs's characters struggle to maintain their peculiar, grounded manners in an increasingly detached world. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Eulogy for the South
Following the weird but vaguely sensible logic of a dream, a teacher finds his school's field trip buses redirected to his father's house, where he grew up.

Once there, the father presents the son's life in a dry slide show.The son rushes from room to room, encountering memories and blocked escapes.A mother and a former lover that he pleads with to hide so that no one should see them.That his lives, past and present, should remain segregated.

And throughout, despite his attempts to put clothes on, the son finds himself naked.

Field Trip, a story from Greg Downs' collection Spit Baths, paints the haunting hopelessness of the great Southern exodus -- the withered roots that never quite break from a region that's all but died.And the guilt that always hangs with the accumulating weight of generations.Each story aches with the same pains.

They flow into each other, each one an expansion on the same themes.The blending of stories is subtle, rich, and connected by the universal string of the past.The prose throughout has a Southern informality to it, making an accessible and enjoyable read which still manages to glimmer with fluid and evocative observation.Cans twang in impacts against the ground, a girl's skin coats her lover's tongue with dried sweat.It all has the familiar, dry, dead beauty of a preserved antebellum house, with furnished rooms all coated in dust.

Spit Baths is a subtle but stunning achievement.A must-read for all Southerners, both resident and expatriate - Greg Downs has given us as grand a eulogy as any for our lost homeland, but tucked it quietly into the obituary page of a small town newspaper.

Excellent insight and character portrayal
I am generally not into this genre of fiction, but, a reading group that I follow picked the book up and I decided I would try it out.I'm glad I did.Greg has an uncanny ability to get deep into his characters with what seems like minimal effort and smooth transition.
I'm looking forward to his future work.

Love these short stories
I thoroughly enjoyed these stories.Downs characters have a very unique view of the world they inhabit.Their pasts weigh heavy on them as they struggle or push themselves to move forward in an ever changing world.Their take on events and often peculiar advice is refreshing, if somewhat bizarre.It's a good read. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Ficket offers an introductory critical biography of Flannery O'Connor, followed by a photographic essay by Douglas Gilbert...
In Part I, "Life and Work," (pp. 1-111), Harold Fickett offers an introductory critical-biography of O'Connor, amply illustrated with photographs.

He traces her growth as a writer and believer by focusing on her artistic development and how her views of sin and salvation apply to her work. Provides an outline of O'Connor's life, her relationship with her parents, and suggests that she developed a character that was "highly sensitive and fiercely independent."

Describes: her adolescent years and relates them to "A Temple of the Holy Ghost"; her participation in Paul Engle's Writer's Workshop at the University of Iowa; her year at Yaddo; and her subsequent moves to New York and Ridgefield, Conn.

Reports on her attack of lupus in late 1950; her treatment with ACTH; and her move back to Milledgeville, Georgia, which "enriched her appreciation of her region dramatically." Suggests that in Wise Blood, O'Connor "won her way through to the narrative method that characterizes her mature work."

Offers a close reading of The Violent Bear It Away and considers her use of foreshadowing and symbolic imagery in this novel. Discusses why O'Connor wrote the Introduction to Memoir of Mary Ann and relates that -- because O'Connor sought to be present to readers only through her writing -- she probably would not have approved of attempts to more fully understand her fiction through her letters. Contends, instead, that she would have preferred that her life be read "as a supreme example of the triumph of the imagination over individual circumstance."

Offers readings of "The Displaced Person" and "Revelation," asserting that the latter is a story that "only a great artist in possession of her powers would have the audacity to write." Concludes with a discussion of O'Connor's final days.

In Part II, "Images," (pp. 112-51), Douglas R. Gilbert provides a photographic essay consisting of thirty-three black and white photographs accompanied by selections from Mystery and Manners and The Habit of Being.

Gilbert's scenes convey the rural nature of O'Connor's region: its dirt roads, gardens, clear-cut and plowed fields, and people at work, leisure, and worship. Particular focus is on religious images: rural churches, Sunday worship services, a cemetery memorial, and a final photograph of a river scene accompanied by text from "The River."

R. Neil Scott / Middle Tennessee State University

A WRITER'S JOURNEY
At her death in 1964, Flannery O'Connor left a small canon of works that made her one of the most critically acclaimed authors of her time. Author Harold Fickett and photographer Douglass Gilbert have teamed up to produce a work that explores O'Connor's development as a Christian writer.

Fickett does a superb job in giving us a biographical view of her life and a detailed analysis of her works. He does a thorough exploration of her work through a Christian lens. Through his meticulous care, Fickett brings out the symbolism, concept of Grace, redemption and salvation that is found throughout her work. He looks at her life and shows how her religious faith as a Catholic served as the impetus for her work.
O'Connor's mission was for readers to see the grotesque and ugly that we in our fallen state share. The ugliness of our human condition is not the final answer for through her work we are shown how God's grace permeates even the darkest hearts.

Douglas Gilbert's black and white pictures of the south and its relationship to O'Connor's work is a compliment to the text. You can feel the soul of the southerner. You can see the human andnatural devastation of man through these moving pictures. The two men have done a splendid job in presenting a critique of O'Connor through a Christian perspective.

My only criticism of the work is that Fickett overstates his case of O'Connor's Christian vision. He sees Christian themes in every detail of her works to the point where you become lost in attempting to focus on the main theme that she is trying to get across.

This is an excellent book for Christian writers and readers who can gain a greater appreciation for O'Connor through the author's analysis and the photographer's pictures. It is also a good work to have in your library for those who have studied O'Connor's works but have failed to consider her Christian perspective. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Essays of varied worth
Essays of varied worth to celebrate the genius of O'Connor. Several are excellent. A few are self-serving and weaken the power of the book.

Flannery Would Be Proud
My hat is off to all the writers who contributed to this book which celebrates the 75th anniversary of Flannery O'Connor's birth. Every piece is a unique glimpse into what O'Connor has meant to so many writers and toso many readers. I was forutnate enough to be in Milledgeville for thelaunch of this book-David Bottoms, Sarah Gordon, Bret Lott, Greg Johnson,and Kellie Wells--thank you for your readings that day. CHEERS.

Indispensable for the Flannery fan
This is a warm and wonderful elegy for one of America's most respected writers. Students, friends, colleagues--all come together to pay homage to one of the seminal figures of twentieth-century literature. Can you tellI'm a fan of Flannery? The short story by Greg Johnson is alone reason tobuy this book. Recommended. ... Read more

Product Description

Customer Reviews (15)

A Complex and Unique Collection
As some of the other reviewers pointed out, it's no surprise that this collection was awarded the prestigious Flannery O'Connor Award. These stories are beautifully crafted and are the sort that you will definitely return to again and again. Vivid and real, the characters are often almost painfully unaffected by their inability to deal with the world around them. What I like best about these stories, though, is how subdued and subtle they are. So much is boiling just under the surface of these stories, and while many of them do have extremely interesting plots, Crouse never lets plot overshadow character or language.

WOW!
I really was blown away by this book! It was an absolutely wondeful read! I remained captivated through its entirety. Highly recommended!

Copy Cats Review
David Crouse's Copy Cats is a book of fictional short stories revolving around characters that are on the fringes of society searching for their sense of self and struggling with truth and lies. Crouse's characters are unable to cope with reality, so they fabricate stories (or lies) to make their lives meaningful and justify their own actions. The structures of the stories are all a kind of twisted irony. The truth and reality the characters live in are presented very simply. By the end the reader is either extremely confused or distraught at the happenings of the story, or a mix of both. And yet, through all the darkness, confusion and irony, the reader is drawn to the beauty of the writing and the almost intimate, personal window given to the reader through his style of writing, allowing the reader to catch a glimpse of the struggle these characters endure.

You can tell why this is an award winner
Crouse writes modern tales in a modern world. His story Click, a novella, is filled with conflict, longing, tension building up to a slap in the face of reality. If you bought the book for this story alone you will come away feeling satisfied with the overall product.Crouse is an excellent writer that tells a great story.

The characters are dark and foreboding, with good intentions through every situation Crouse's protagonists deal with. The plots are cutting but believable. It is as if you were listening to a friend telling you a supremely odd tale tempting you to cry out, "No Way!"right in the middle of them.Stranger things do happen in the real world, and when they occur they are the things one talks about over and over again amongst friends and at gatherings.

I highly recommend this book.

We Are Real
I think of that line, taken from a Silver Jews song, because it describes this book fully. These are real people--fringe, or whatever you want to call them. There is something true about this book that some people may not want to admit. The sometimes broken nature of our selves that plays out in unsuspected ways runs rampant through these stories--they are stories about here, about now. Buy this, you need it.

Also, look for a fun little story by Crouse in the Dark Horse Book of the Dead. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Examines Flannery O'Connor's language, focusing on her use of irony and metaphor...
Kessler examines Flannery O'Connor's use of language, and sees her "in the company of apocalyptic poets like Blake and T.S. Eliot."

Suggests that her metaphors are rarely "satisfying correspondences between man and natural order, as [are] those of Eudora Welty and Wallace Stevens." Looks as well at her use of physical and verbal gestures, "in order to approach the hidden truth they so often misrepresent."

Observes that although O'Connor "spent a lot of time getting 'seems' and 'as if' constructions out" of her novel, The Violent Bear It Away, "the stylistic tic remained." Finds this to be "a sympton of some deeper struggle [for O'Connor] to work out her unconscious poetics." Argues that O'Connor's "metaphors, particularly her characteristic 'as if' release a power, often violent and threatening, that demands the death of understanding before the reader can begin to evolve a new consciousness."

Contends that because O'Connor rejected "a return to the human community offered by comedy," and denied that "suffering ends with tragedy," she was left with only two verbal avenues with which to conclude her narratives: to use irony in order to imply the existence of a transforming power; or, to use metaphor to "show that same power acting within external nature and imaginative vision."

Suggests that Flannery O'Connor's writings demonstrate her belief that "the cure is neither behind us nor before us but within us." Discusses her attention to society at large; the limited value she placed on geography and place; and, her intent to convey to her readers that: "no amount of social renovation can renovate the individual self ... other people can entertain and comfort us but [they] cannot join us in the process of discovering what may be."

Compares her work to that of Carson McCullers, Erskine Caldwell and Nathanael West.

Concludes that metaphor was O'Connor's "instrument for accommodating transcendent vision to the traditional materials of prose fiction ... [and] her raids on the inarticulate remain among the most powerful in contemporary literature."

R. Neil Scott / Middle Tennessee State University ... Read more

Product Description

Customer Reviews (2)

Examines O'Connor's use of Christ as hero, medieval folk art as a template and views her characters as symbolic gargoyles...
Finds the roots of O'Connor's grotesque fiction "located in medieval folk art." Describes the purposes of grotesque art, and focuses on its "comic shock treatment." Contends that the climactic scene of "The Artificial Nigger" serves as a key to understanding O'Connor's grotesque style.

Describes O'Connor's art as mocking and challenging "a restricted point of view," that of idealized beauty or propriety, only to be labeled "ugly and evil." Suggets that her use of "deranged fundamentalists" serve as freakish, crippled gargoyles who "measure `a grotesque distance' between their Christian subculture and that of `the liberal secular' world."

Outlines her use of Christ as the ideal behind her satire, an ideal "that must be degraded as well as exalted if it is ever to be a living presence in the physical world." Then, offers evidence to support Stanley Edgar Hyman's claim that "Christ is the real hero" of O'Connor's fiction.

Discusses, in this context, her novel Wise Blood, "The Displaced Person" ("an ironic passion play"), and "Parker's Back" (a sacrilegious, "Punch-and-Judy show about the difference between religion and faith").

Finds her regard for the body reflective of a medieval outlook and unique in American fiction "distinguished by its candor and unflinching realism." Sees her characters as "both beautiful and ugly, impressive and ludicrous." Discusses, in this context, Mrs. Shortley of "The Displaced Person," Ruby of "A Stroke of Good Fortune," Hulga of "Good Country People," the twelve-year-old girl of "A Temple of the Holy Ghost," Tarwater of The Violent Bear It Away, and Nelson of "The Artificial Nigger."

Examines The Violent Bear It Away, focusing on Francis Marion Tarwater, "one of O'Connor's grimmest protagonists, so serious that he is unintentionally funny." Finds the work to be a mixture of "prophecy and satire, holy seriousness and unholy flippancy." Reads "A Circle in the Fire" as "a disturbing religious story" in which "the meek inherit the land by burning it," and reflective of O'Connor's "complicated humor" derived from demonic elements. Considers "The River," an illustration of how blasphemy and grotesqueness can serve the same satirical purpose. Offers a twenty-eight page explication of "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," seen as O'Connor's "little masterpiece" and "a crash course in the grotesque."

Sees O'Connor as a chronicler of the collapse of the subculture of the white American South, who leaves Southern literature "`demythified.'" Discusses, in the context of this contention, O'Connor's narrator, her use of the role of carnival, and offers readings of The Violent Bear It Away, "A Late Encounter with the Enemy," "The Partridge Festival," "The Enduring Chill," "Judgement Day," "Revelation," and "The River."

R. Neil Scott / Middle Tennessee State University

DiRenzo understands O'Conner
There is a temptation to say that O'Conner is just out there.DiRenzo does a great job putting O'conner in context. ... Read more