Last chance for Flannery O'Connor!!
Discussion questions for Saturday just went out to everyone who's signed up
We are reading “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” and discussing it Saturday at the first meeting of the Flannery O’Connor Book Club.
The five discussion questions for day one just went out to everyone earlier today. If you didn’t get the discussion questions, you’re not signed up. (If you signed up but didn’t get them, email support@boldtypetickets.com)
To join the club, buy a ticket:
And then grab a copy of her short stories.
This is the edition that we recommend, although any edition of her short stories will do.
If you don’t care about having the same page numbers as everyone else during discussions, other editions work too.
For example, if you have copies of her two published short story collections from her lifetime, A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Everything That Rises Must Converge, the stories we’re going to read in this club originally appeared in one or the other.
These are editions I have picked up secondhand over the years:
After we spend five weeks doing five different stories — all considered masterpieces of the short story form — we’re going to read O’Connor’s debut novel, Wise Blood.
Co-captain of this club
teaches Wise Blood in the English department at Northwestern, so I can’t wait to be a student in Professor Bouldrey’s class.The edition I read in college is on the left. Still full of my student notes and underlinings.
But I bought a fresh copy of the recommended edition — on the right — for this club. We won’t get to Wise Blood till November though.
For extra credit, extra edification — for anyone who wants to understand what Flannery was up to from her own point of view — the book Mystery and Manners is indispensable.
It’s a posthumously put together collection of her essays about writing, and it gives clues to the readers of her fiction what she was attempting to do, and what she thought of her own fiction and other people’s.
We won’t be reading that in club, but we’ll refer to it from time to time, and if you care about the craft of writing, or how to apply one’s philosophy about the world to one’s creative work, it’s a must-read.
FrizzLit book club all-star
wrote about Mystery and Manners on her substack a few weeks ago:I think it’s been at least fifteen years since the last time I read Mystery and Manners, a collection of essays and lectures published after O’Connor’s death. My copy is full of marginalia, some from college and some from later perusals. Mostly I just underlined things, with some stars and exclamation points in the margins. I’m quite an excitable reader.
Melissa chooses two favorite quotes from this book — favorites of mine, too, go see what they are — and adds, “Flannery’s tartness is what I love most about her.”
Here’s Wiley’s piece:
Is it Saturday morning yet? I can’t wait to get started.
If you’d like to get the discussion questions for Saturday, sign up and you will find them included with your receipt and confirmation.