I'm giving this five stars not because it's without flaws, but because there just isn't a bad story in this collection. Just under twenty years of work in this volume, and it's just--extraordinary. My current favorite might be "Good Country People" in large part because of how unusual it is in her oeuvre to write a character like Hulga, and how skillfully she does it. ( )

She is an indisputable master of the short story and one of America's greatest literary talents. A Temple Of The Holy Ghost is my favorite story. Reading her makes me feel nauseous, though. ( )

I got hooked with "Good Country People," and it's been downhill ever since.

******

This was a Kindle Daily Deal a couple days ago, so it doesn't hurt to have it in both hardcover and digital format, right? RIGHT. I ought to re-read these very soon. ( )

capsules of southern culture

I have always found it more difficult to review a short-story collection than a novel. With a novel there are going to be characteristics that you like and don’t like, but ultimately you try to take those into account in developing an overall assessment of the work. A novel is begging to be assessed on its overall impact, not based on its individual pieces and parts. A short-story collection, though, is typically a collection of independent pieces that were likely written in isolation of each other and each piece can be assessed individually. If I loved one short story, another was good and a few were so-so, how do I provide the collection a single assessment or score? I have noticed that the average ratings of short-story collections seem to be rated higher overall than novels. Maybe it is my misperception, but that has been my impression. When I am done with reading a collection of short stories, there is often one or a few of the stories that stick in my mind, that have grabbed my attention and won’t let it go. I think my tendency, and perhaps that of others, is to focus too much on those few great stories in scoring the total collection.

While I try to fight this tendency, I decided to take a more analytic approach this time. There are 31 stories in Flannery O’Connor’s The Complete Stories. I decided to rate each story immediately after reading it and then to average the scores when done with the collection. In doing so, I rated 13 stories 5 stars, 12 stories 4 stars, four stories were 3 stars and two stories only received 2 stars. My average was 4.16 versus the current average rating on Goodreads for the collection of 4.40. I rated the overall collection 5 stars, and I was very comfortable doing this. Regardless of my average score, the predominance of stories rated 4 or 5 stars was clear proof to me of the stellar quality of this collection.

Flannery O’Connor only lived 39 years. She produced 31 short stories and two novels. The Complete Stories, which was published posthumously in 1972, won the National Book Award in 1972. In a 2009 poll, The Complete Stories was voted the best book in the National Book Award’s 60-year history. I had previously read one of the two collections that Ms. O’Connor published during her lifetime, A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories, which represented 10 of the 31. I thoroughly enjoyed reading those 10 again as part of the 31. It is also interesting, from a reader’s perspective, that the stories are arranged in The Complete Stories in the order they were written, so you can try to assess the development of Flannery O’Connor’s abilities over time. Mostly I was just wowed at how good the early stories were, although the few stories I rated 2 or 3 stars were almost all in the first third of the collection. Two of my favorites are well-known classics, A Good Man Is Hard To Find, and the title story of her other collection, Everything That Rises Must Converge. However, I think what I most enjoyed was finding relevance in her stories to issues of today, despite their setting in a time and place well in the past. One of these was Displaced Person which I thought did an excellent job of describing the motivation to protect one’s own and the fears of the unknown that underlie so much of America’s reaction to immigration.

The one consistency I found through most of these stories, though, was their ability to make me feel uncomfortable. There were times that I was conflicted: I wanted to read quickly on to discover what happened and I wanted to put the story down because I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the outcome. And then there is the language, which is going to offend some. But then the language is, I believe, true to time and place, and in such a case I can only thank the author for using language to make that time and place real for me.

Overall, a remarkable reading experience. ( )