Tags: C

Summary: The stories themselves easily get a five. O'Connor was a genius, combining her Catholicism, her Southern-ness, and the grotesque in stories that explore the nature of revelation, grace (or the lack thereof), and redemption. The stories have characters who are often "freaks"-physically (legless, armless, fat, pock-marked) and psychologically. Frequently, the stories are violent, shockingly so; and if not violent, then they still surprise or shock us in some way. My jaw has hit the floor reading each story. But they are meant to startle us into our own revelation. It requires patience and careful reading and re-reading to get to the heart of O'Connor's writing, but it's well worth the effort.The collection itself gets, at best, a two. It is very poorly organized, as others have mentioned. Rather than a table of contents listing every story, the main table of contents lists only "major" works-that is, the novels (Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away) and the collections (A Good Man Is Hard To Find and Everything That Rises Must Converge). To find a particular story, one must either know what collection it appears in or must check separate tables of contents within the book. I'm probably nitpicking, but it can be frustrating, especially for someone new to O'Connor. The included essays are O'Connors most well-known and provide important and interesting insights into her writing and themes. Many of the letters are intriguing, but many others consist of a few lines and are not extremely useful (there's a two-line letter to Walker Percy, congratulating him on an award, which tells us virtually nothing at all; include it in a book of O'Connor's letters but not in a sampling of her best and most important). Beyond that, the letters are very poorly indexed. Sometimes, an index entry refers the reader to a page with no reference to the topic; other times, an entry lists, say, two references, whereas there are actually three or four among the letters.It's wonderful to have all this under one cover, but I wish they'd have taken just a bit more time to produce a better volume.