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"