The Complete Stories (Centennial Edition)

Winner of the National Book Award

Now with a new essay by 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 an essay by the critic Hilton Als.

Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964) was one of America’s most gifted writers. She wrote two novels, Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away, and two story collections, A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Everything That Rises Must Converge. Her Complete Stories, published posthumously in 1972, won the National Book Award that year, and in a 2009 online poll it was voted as the best book to have won the award in the contest’s 60-year history. Her essays were published in Mystery and Manners and her letters in The Habit of Being.