A Good Man Is Hard To Find And Other Stories

Flannery O'Connor was a true Southern original. The grotesque and the ordinary intrigued her; the absurd delighted her. She saw revelation and apocalypse everywhere. Time magazine described her work as "highly unladylike...[with] a brutal irony, a slam-bam humor, and a style of writing as balefully direct as a death sentence." All those qualities are on full display in these unforgettable tales of the rural South.In the title story, a grandmother unwittingly leads her family to an encounter with the notorious, murderous Misfit; in "Good Country People," a young woman's wooden leg is stolen by the Bible salesman she is trying to seduce; and in "A Late Encounter with the Enemy," 104-year-old General Sash faces life's ultimate test at his granddaughter's graduation."A story really isn't any good," Flannery O'Connor wrote, "unless it successfully resists paraphrase, until it hangs on and expands in the mind." Each of the ten stories in A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories does just that. Together, they proble the sinew of the American soul and, at the same time, compile a horrific yet deeply comic anatomy of the human condition.