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“... thickly neighboured: the story exists in the minds of all who were there,’ or when he praises Flannery O’Connor’s fidelity to ‘the inner riot that may possess the lonely man or woman at some unwary moment in the hours of their day’. Now this is more like it, you can hear Pritchett saying to himself. The distinction he is secretly making ...”

“... and physical violence, incest and sticky despair are as unsettling as anything in Faulkner or Flannery O’Connor, betraying a sensibility that has no room for the pieties of van Bruggen and his contemporaries. The irony of the book’s title is obvious. Triomf is the name of a suburb of dilapidated modern houses, now occupied by white municipal ...”

“... is often now seen as the archetypal Southern writer. She seems to have more in common with Flannery O’Connor, if people are to be clamped in boxes. She was never part of any school. In her short stories, which are the best of her work, she fires off none of the quick-thud ironic or melodramatic shots and uses none of the swift falls into a ...”

“... in us.’ The faithful Bann is the most conscientious of editors, though a reference to ‘Flann O’Connor’ conjures a nightmare hybrid of Flann O’Brien and Flannery O’Connor. Almost fifty years on he can confirm doubtful dates in Finlay’s letter by cross-checking them with the date-stamp on the ...”

“... Then, sorry to say, he pretty much did the same to the old man. You can hear the influence of Flannery O’Connor in Means’s prose: in the scintillating shiver of the beautiful imagery, in the lack of sentimentality, in the interest in grotesque violence and gothic tricksterism. (Stephen Crane may be another influential predecessor, the Crane of ...”

“... construction (‘I might could go to the pictures with you’), and their shock at discovering Flannery O’Connor and Richard Ford. Unlike some small American colleges which aspire to be the Oxford of the Ozarks, plus royaliste que le roi, Birmingham-Southern has decided to take advantage of its region and its size. The lively young English faculty ...”

“... vernacular suggests a kinship with her older contemporaries, Singer, Malamud and Bellow. Like Flannery O’Connor, another American original who came of age in the Fifties, Paley has concentrated on short fiction, and her major work is assembled in a single, not extraordinarily hefty volume. (She began writing as a poet, but her first volume of ...”

“... striking ability to identify new talent. He was the first reviewer to recognise the brilliance of Flannery O’Connor; he sought an English audience for Raymond Queneau; in 1961, he proclaimed the genius of Harold Pinter. (Pinter has since returned the favour by reading two of Maclaren-Ross’s stories on the radio.) Willetts valiantly charts his endless ...”

“... by the reviews. But the short stories are marvels of storytelling – straightforward, no tricks. Flannery O’Connor wrote to a friend: ‘I have discovered a short-story writer who is better than any of them, including myself. Go to the library and get a book called The Magic Barrel by Bernard Malamud.’ A few of the stories, written after Malamud won ...”

“... The circumstances surrounding John Kennedy Toole’s fictions are as pure American Gothic as even Flannery O’Connor could devise. Without any of his friends suspecting he had authorial ambitions, Toole wrote A Confederacy of Dunces in the early Sixties, while doing his national service in Puerto Rico. The manuscript was submitted to Simon and ...”

“... But the special contribution of such Catholic writers as Allen Tate, Caroline Gordon, Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy is absent. Percy in particular was no less hostile than Genovese himself to social engineering, country-club greed, cultural tawdriness and hedonistic hippiedom. Finally, he barely refers to any contemporary political ...”

“... figure in the shape of J.P. Mayhew, a drinking Southern gentleman, but it’s closer here to Flannery O’Connor, the great American artist of the grotesque. She once said she didn’t think that the texture of Southern life was ‘any more grotesque than that of the rest of the nation, but it does seem evident that the Southern writer is ...”

“... it. Porter was not a great admirer of Faulkner, but she was very sympathetic to Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor. Like them she paid close attention to children’s and women’s lives, to the private worlds of vulnerable figures in a strongly familial, traditional, religious and intrusive society. It would be possible to pigeonhole Porter as a ...”

“... in a novel without making a dog’s dinner out of the book? Some people, such as Graham Greene, Flannery O’Connor, Chinua Achebe, Georges Bernanos, Kate O’Brien, Maurice Gee, Brian Moore and Andrew O’Hagan, have made a big effort. Others, such as James Joyce, have managed to weave religion into a larger fabric, with all the sheer drama of faith ...”

“... to remind myself how the whole thing only occupies 20 pages of text. ‘Meaning,’ says Flannery O’Connor, ‘is what keeps the short story from being short.’ ‘A Return to the Glens’ is the strongest story in J.I.M. Stewart’s collection My Aunt Christina. Andrew Pringle, a retired barrister and widower, on a walking tour in ...”