This volume gathers all of Flannery O'Connor's short fiction, from her earliest student pieces to her last stories, written as her health failed. It includes the contents of her two main collections as well as other stories. The setting is mostly the rural and small-town South, with its farms, porches, roadsides and bus rides.
Readers meet stubborn mothers, restless intellectuals, wandering preachers, children and con men, often in comic confrontations that expose vanity and self-deception. Beneath the humour runs a serious Christian vision of human weakness and the sudden, sometimes violent arrival of grace. The book won the National Book Award in 1972 and remains the best single place to see the full range of her art.