A Circle in the Fire and Other Stories by Flannery O'Connor


A Circle in the Fire and Other Stories
Title : A Circle in the Fire and Other Stories
Author :
Rating :
ISBN : -
Language : English
Format Type : Hardcover
Number of Pages : 368
Publication : First published January 1, 1954

‘His heart constricted with a repulsion for himself so clear and intense that he gasped for breath. He had stuffed his own emptiness with good works like a glutton.’ In ‘The Lame Shall Enter First’, one of the unforgettable stories in this collection, a widower realises that the charity of which he has been so indignantly proud was but a means of stifling his grief. The violent epiphany that seizes him comes too late – the tragedies wrought by self-delusion and hubris may, finally, be understood, but they may not always be repaired. This is the central theme of Flannery O’Connor’s coruscating, plain-speaking fiction: the painful, necessary salvation that emerges from catastrophic, life-changing, and sometimes life-ending, events.

O’Connor was the first fiction writer born in the 20th century to have her works collected and published by the Library of America. She grew up in a Roman Catholic family in Savannah, Georgia and stated that her writing was an expression of her religious commitment. Her characters are torn between the sensory and the spiritual, many of them gripped by morbid preoccupations as they attempt unsuccessfully to unite these dual impulses. Warped park guard Enoch Emery performs ritualistic tours, spying on female bathers and aggravating the animals at the zoo, awaiting the sign that will tell him to reveal the ‘mystery’ at ‘The Heart of the Park’. Many are fanatics, like the blind preacher in ‘The Peeler’. They, and their stories, are comic-grotesque, intertwining glimpses of the transcendental world with physical and psychological horror. This selection includes ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’ and ‘Everything that Rises Must Converge’, two of O’Connor’s best-known works. Deanna Staffo’s powerful illustrations capture O’Connor’s Southern settings and macabre, surrealistic style. In a compelling introduction, American author C. E. Morgan, selected as one of The New Yorker’s prestigious ‘20 Under 40’ writers, explores the stories’ uncompromising, idiosyncratic wisdom.

A Circle in the Fire and Other Stories Reviews

  • Realini

    A Circle in the Fire
    Spoiler alert: I will write about what is happening in the story, including the end: as much as I gather from it.

    Flannery O’Connor is a great writer. With every short story I read, I become more enthusiastic about meeting such a wonderful spirit.
    A Circle in the Fire managed to annoy me, but then we are supposed to experience all kinds of emotions, feelings when we read a fabulous book.
    In this short story we meet a few complex characters: Mrs. Stone seems to be inclined to do (some) good and is a kind of an early student of Positive Psychology, or a reader of Stoic Philosophy: we have to be satisfied with what we have, let’s look at the bright side…in that vein. She has an employee who is the exact opposite- moaning and complaining all the time. It turns out that Aristotle was right when he placed the truth, the virtue in the middle, at least in this story.

    Or maybe Mrs. Pritchard, the doomsayer was the one who got it right.
    Three children come to visit and they say they want to spend only one day at the farm. They are offered some biscuits which they refuse and gradually become more and more misbehaved. They do not leave the land of MRs Stone the next day and start causing havoc. They ride the horses even if they had been forbidden, start throwing rocks at the mail post, let loose the bull and have conversations in which they plainly show they don’t feel the owner should have so much land, forest.

    Even if they are confronted by Mrs. Stone who had been kind to them up to a point, there are no results, except for very dramatic ones:
    They set fire to the bushes and, we can suppose to the forest itself.

    This is one thing, out of so many, that I love about the writing of Flannery O’Connor: the endings- we do not know for sure what the final result is. We can expect it, but we can’t be sure. Like in The River, there’s no happy ending, on the contrary.


    I love the stories of Flannery O’Connor!

  • Lloyd Hughes

    Flannery O’Connor is a very gifted writer. Her sentences are crisp and clean. Her words are understandable. She spins a tale that sets a hook and reels you in. Her stories take us just far enough to qualify as complete and to leave plenty of room for discussion.

    I’ve read she was devout in her faith. Her stories remind me of the Parables told by Jesus in the Bible. She creates a situation that puts a burr under our saddle blanket , giving us a knee jerk reaction of sanctimony, which upon extended discussion is just as likely as not to land us in a position 180 degrees from where we started. ‘A Circle of Fire’ does just that. Four stars for this story, 5 stars for FOC.

  • T P Kennedy

    There's great power in these stories but they are very disturbing. Southern Gothic seems to eliminate any glimmer of hope. These are deeply flawed people struggling against their fates and invariably losing. Not a good idea to read too many of these tales in one sitting!

  • Rado Baťo

    I was not sure what I can expect from "Southern Gothic Roman Catholic" writer. Now I know - a superb stories with extraordinary if not grotesque characters, often with really shocking ending.
    Flannery O'Connor has a ways how to get into your head and not leave after you put her book down. And "A Good Man is Hard to Find" is easily in my TOP 10 short stories of all time.

  • Steve Shilstone

    Superb craftswoman and dialect artist with a knack for providing really cool final sentences to her stories.