A month or so ago I purchased The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor and it has been sitting on my shelf while I tried to figure out how to read it. The book is thick, roughly 500 pages, and I knew that if I tore into it I wouldn't appreciate all the stories as individual works of art and they would meld into each other. Finally, the other day I decided that I would read one of Flannery's stories a each day until I finished the book. There are 31 stories so I've got a month of great stories to digest.
I'm only a couple of days into my mission but thus far the stories and my plan have been great. If at all possible I've tried to read the daily story in the morning and thus I have the opportunity to think about it all day long. Several times I've found myself standing around at work with nothing going on and I ask myself which story I read that morning. Then I replay the story in my head. This process seems way better than reading a bunch at one sitting because each story is clear and separate in my head. And since the collection is organized chronologically I will get to witness Flannery's progression.
Right now I'm reading the stories she wrote while working on her MFA in Iowa, they are good but don't yet have the violence of her later work. I'm excited to reach those.
If this goes well I'll consider doing the same for another author, possibly Carver or someone else you suggest.
This is an excellent goal! I have some collections of short stories by Poe, Hawthorne, King, William Carlos Williams...maybe I'll try the same thing!
ReplyDeleteI just started reading a newer collection of some of Vonnegut's old shorts and in the introduction he claims than Flannery is the greatest short story writer of their generation. I would agree, there. In the first half of the 20th Century short stories were an important and popular diversion, today they are collected only if an author becomes famous, but otherwise they are not read at all. Terry Southern, Tom Wolfe and JG Ballard are others who have excellent short story and journalism collections available.
ReplyDeleteK Waldrip
I don't know if you're familiar with the oxford writer Barry Hannah, but a month or so ago some people on fb started a petition to get some of his books back in print. They also talked about a need for a collected stories. Word went around that Grove was thinking about it. Then Barry died last week and the likelihood of a collected stories seems more real. It is a shame that kind of thing happens so often after death.
ReplyDeleteA month has passed--did you read all her stories?
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