Audiobooks by Flannery O’Connor

A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories

This now classic book revealed Flannery O'Connor as one of the most original and provocative writers to emerge from the South. Her apocalyptic vision of life is expressed through grotesque, often comic situations in which the principal character faces a problem of salvation: the grandmother, in the title story, confronting the murderous Misfit; a neglected four-year-old boy looking for the Kingdom of Christ in the fast-flowing waters of the river; General Sash, about to meet the final enemy. Stories included are "A Good Man Is Hard to Find", "The River", "The Life You Save May Be Your Own", "A Stroke of Good Fortune", "A Temple of the Holy Ghost", "The Artificial Nigger", "A Circle in the Fire", "A Late Encounter with the Enemy", "Good Country People" and "The Displaced Person". "O'Connor's works, like Maupassant's, are characterized by precision, density, and an almost alarming circumscription…In these stories the rural South is, for the first time, viewed by a writer whose orthodoxy matches her talent. The results are revolutionary."-New York Times Book Review

Flannery O’Connor (Author), Marguerite Gavin (Narrator)

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Everything That Rises Must Converge

This collection of nine short stories by Flannery O'Connor was published posthumously in 1965. The flawed characters of each story are fully revealed in apocalyptic moments of conflict and violence that are presented with comic detachment. The title story is a tragicomedy about social pride, racial bigotry, generational conflict, false liberalism, and filial dependence. The protagonist, Julian Chestny, is hypocritically disdainful of his mother's prejudices, but his smug selfishness is replaced with childish fear when she suffers a fatal stroke after being struck by a black woman she has insulted out of oblivious ignorance rather than malice. Similarly, 'The Comforts of Home' is about an intellectual son with an Oedipus complex. Driven by the voice of his dead father, the son accidentally kills his sentimental mother in an attempt to murder a harlot. The other stories are 'A View of the Woods,' 'Parker's Back,' 'The Enduring Chill,' 'Greenleaf,' 'The Lame Shall Enter First,' 'Revelation,' and 'Judgment Day.' Flannery O'Connor was working on Everything That Rises Must Converge at the time of her death. This collection is an exquisite legacy from a genius of the American short story, in which she scrutinizes territory familiar to her readers: race, faith, and morality. The stories encompass the comic and the tragic, the beautiful and the grotesque; each carries her highly individual stamp and could have been written by no one else. 'The current volume of posthumous stories is the work of a master, a writer's writer'but a reader's too'an incomparable craftsman who wrote, let it be said, some of the finest stories in our language.''Newsweek

Flannery O’Connor (Author), Various Readers (Narrator)

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The Violent Bear It Away

First published in 1955, The Violent Bear It Away is now a landmark in American literature. It is a dark and absorbing example of the Gothic sensibility and bracing satirical voice that are united in Flannery O'Conner's work. In it, the orphaned Francis Marion Tarwater and his cousin, Rayber, defy the prophecy of their dead uncle—that Tarwater will become a prophet and will baptize Rayber's young son, Bishop. A series of struggles ensue, as Tarwater fights an internal battle against his innate faith and the voices calling him to be a prophet, while Rayber tries to draw Tarwater into a more "reasonable" modern world. Both wrestle with the legacy of their dead relatives and lay claim to Bishop's soul. O'Connor observes all this with an astonishing combination of irony and compassion, humor and pathos. The result is a novel whose range and depth reveal a brilliant and innovative writer acutely alert to where the sacred lives and where it does not. "There is very little contemporary fiction which touches the level of Flannery O'Connor at her best."—New York Herald Tribune

Flannery O’Connor (Author), Mark Bramhall (Narrator)

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Wise Blood

Flannery O'Connor's astonishing and haunting first novel is a classic of twentieth-century literature. It is the story of Hazel Motes, a twenty-two-year-old caught in an unending struggle against his innate, desperate faith. He falls under the spell of a 'blind' street preacher named Asa Hawks and his degenerate fifteen-year-old daughter. In an ironic, malicious gesture of his own non-faith, and to prove himself a greater cynic than Hawks, Hazel founds The Church of God Without Christ but is still thwarted in his efforts to lose God. He meets Enoch Emery, a young man with 'wise blood,' who leads him to a mummified holy child and whose crazy maneuvers are a manifestation of Hazel's existential struggles. This tale of redemption, retribution, false prophets, blindness, and wisdom gives us one of the most riveting characters in American fiction. 'No other major American writer of our century has constructed a fictional world so energetically and forthrightly charged by religious investigation.''New Yorker

Flannery O’Connor (Author), Bronson Pinchot (Narrator)

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