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emlickliter's review against another edition
emotional
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
5.0
Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose by Flannery O'Connor, Sally Fitzgerald (Editor), Robert Fitzgerald (Editor) - The last and unpublished works by my favorite Southern Gothic writers were polished into this collection. Enjoy one of the queens of lyrical prose! Happy Reading!
alltheradreads's review against another edition
3.0
Flannery is my favorite. She was young and brilliant and sassy and so honest in her writing and faith. I can't read enough by her. When I found this collection of prose by her in my local used bookstore, I was so excited. It's a mix of essays and pieces she published and things that were never published, which was really cool to me. O'Connor writes a lot about writing, a lot about the South, a lot about the church and faith, and a lot about fiction/literature. If any of those things interest you, READ HER STUFF. That is all. If Flannery wasn't such an odd name, I would seriously consider it for my future child.
neuschb's review against another edition
3.0
"All novelists are fundamentally seekers and describers of the real, but the realism of each novelist will depend on his view of the ultimate reaches of reality." So says O'Conner in "The Grotesque in Southern Fiction." I agree.
ill_be_your_huckleberry's review against another edition
3.0
This is mixture of essays and typescripts for lectures produced in the 1960s. Flannery O'Connor has always been an enigma to me, and these writings give depth to lot of her literary idiosyncrasies. In particular, the grotesque and peculiar traits of many of her characters. O'Connor has an enormous fascination with the poor but not in an exploitative sense. The mystery of survival brings out those supreme personalities, and writers should take heed, instead of using plot to characterize. O'Connor explains this in detail for a workshop lecture: "In most good stories it is the character's personality that creates the action of the story. In most of these stories, I feel that the writer has thought of some action and then scrounged up a character to perform it. If you start with a real personality, a real character, then something is bound to happen; and you don't have to know what before you begin. In fact it may be better if you don't know what before you begin."
k_gregz's review against another edition
4.0
I picked this up because I wanted more of Flannery O'Connor's snarky attitude in my life. Before reading this, I was only familiar with some of her interviews about the grotesque and being a Catholic writer in the South. You get a lot of that in here, to the point that it does get a little repetitive. I found myself getting bored when some of the essays returned to the same arguments about these topics. I also wasn't a fan of her disapproving stance towards modern literature and English teachers, though I was a little amused by it. However, I think her essay on the Southern Writer and the Grotesque and her essay on Writing Short Stories made the experience worth it. I'm probably partial to those because I usually teach "A Good Man is Hard to Find" and both of those essays address that story. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed the last piece in the volume, an introduction for a memoir of a child who died young in a Catholic children's hospital. I loved the connection O'Connor traced between Nathaniel Hawthorne's encounter with a disfigured child in a hospital ward and his daughter's life's work, which established the hospital that cared for the young girl. But, to be honest, I knew I would like O'Connor's intro when it began "Stories of pious children tend to be false." That's my kind of snark.
idontkaren's review against another edition
5.0
Deserves to be read and re-read, along with her short stories and novels.
jnepal's review against another edition
4.0
I love Flannery's writing.
These essays were pretty interesting and I think Flannery had some smoking insight, but I do think she (in these essays, anyway) sometimes became somewhat myopic. She, at points, seemed to set in stone her preferences for writing/stories, and thereby seemed to dismiss other forms of writing/stories. Maybe I'm misunderstanding her, but that's what it seemed like to me.
But I love the realities she saw and the way in which she went about trying to help others see.
These essays were pretty interesting and I think Flannery had some smoking insight, but I do think she (in these essays, anyway) sometimes became somewhat myopic. She, at points, seemed to set in stone her preferences for writing/stories, and thereby seemed to dismiss other forms of writing/stories. Maybe I'm misunderstanding her, but that's what it seemed like to me.
But I love the realities she saw and the way in which she went about trying to help others see.
ferrantes's review against another edition
4.0
It's hard to know how to rate this book, because although I admire O' Connor I have some pretty fundamental disagreements with her--but it's still a beautiful and brilliant book which I feel I learned a lot from. I might revisit this review once I've thought about it more.
bookhound's review against another edition
4.0
The opening essay on peacocks is great ("king of the birds!"). I also really enjoyed learning her thoughts on fiction, mainly because I need assistance when thinking about her writing.
savaging's review against another edition
3.0
I dislike so many things about Flannery O'Connor -- her dogmatic Catholicism, her venom toward the faithless world and other would-be writers -- and yet all the same I'm in love with her. I'm not the only one; what's wrong with us?
O'Connor's the mean girl in your writers' group:
"Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher. The idea of being a writer attracts a good many shiftless people, those who are merely burdened with poetic feelings or afflicted with sensibility."
Her own explanations of her work is often irritating to me. Her ultimate aim is to preach Catholic dogma and further the glory of God. But what remarkable talent, that reading her fiction alone none of us would have guessed it.
At least half of the essays in this book are about being Catholic, and would have been helpful to me when I was studying literature at a religious university. In one class we watched an interview where Mormon leader Boyd K. Packer, who also dabbles in painting, asserts that the role of the artist isn't to document the world with all its nastiness, but improve and perfect it. In contrast, O'Connor says the writer has to write what he or she sees, and "To look at the worst will be for him no more than an act of trust in God." (Let's hope the two of them can have a curmudgeon-off one day in the starry Great Beyond.)
Or as O'Connor writes elsewhere: "I lent some stories to a country lady who lives down the road from me, and when she returned them, she said, 'Well, them stories just gone and shown you how some folks would do,' and I thought to myself that that was right; when you write stories, you have to be content to start exactly there -- showing how some specific folks will do, will do in spite of everything."
O'Connor's the mean girl in your writers' group:
"Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher. The idea of being a writer attracts a good many shiftless people, those who are merely burdened with poetic feelings or afflicted with sensibility."
Her own explanations of her work is often irritating to me. Her ultimate aim is to preach Catholic dogma and further the glory of God. But what remarkable talent, that reading her fiction alone none of us would have guessed it.
At least half of the essays in this book are about being Catholic, and would have been helpful to me when I was studying literature at a religious university. In one class we watched an interview where Mormon leader Boyd K. Packer, who also dabbles in painting, asserts that the role of the artist isn't to document the world with all its nastiness, but improve and perfect it. In contrast, O'Connor says the writer has to write what he or she sees, and "To look at the worst will be for him no more than an act of trust in God." (Let's hope the two of them can have a curmudgeon-off one day in the starry Great Beyond.)
Or as O'Connor writes elsewhere: "I lent some stories to a country lady who lives down the road from me, and when she returned them, she said, 'Well, them stories just gone and shown you how some folks would do,' and I thought to myself that that was right; when you write stories, you have to be content to start exactly there -- showing how some specific folks will do, will do in spite of everything."