SPOILER ALERT: Joyce Carol Oates reviews O'Connor

Check out interesting essay from the New York Review of Books, by super-prolific fiction writer Joyce Carol Oates.

Included are words of wisdom from Flannery herself:

Writers who see by the light of their Christian faith will have, in these times, the sharpest eye for the grotesque, for the perverse, and for the unacceptable.... To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.—Flannery O'Connor, "The Fiction Writer and His Country"

Whenever I'm asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.
—Flannery O'Connor, "Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction"

Flannery O'Connor: What are We Reading?

What are we reading? Wise Blood, a novella; and two short stories: "A Good Man is Hard to Find" and "Everything That Rises Must Converge."

Three by Flannery O'Connor includes Wise Blood and "Everything Rises," but NOT "A Good Man is Hard to Find." NOTE: titles of these two stories are used to name O'Connor's two book-length collections of stories (i.e., book title is same as title of titular story). Her first published collection, A Good Man is Hard to Find, includes "A Good Man is Hard to Find"; "The Life you Save May Be Your Own"; and "Good Country People." O'Connor's second story collection, entitled "Everything That Rises Must Converge," includes "Greenleaf," which appears in The Best American Short Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike; "Revelation"; "Parker's Back"; and of course, "Everything That Rises Must Converge."