Collected Works: Wise Blood / A Good Man Is Hard to Find / The Violent Bear It Away / Everything That Rises Must Converge / Essays and Letters by Flannery OConnor

Collected Works: Wise Blood / A Good Man Is Hard to Find / The Violent Bear It Away / Everything That Rises Must Converge / Essays and Letters Reviews

• 
  Jonathan

  I would not dispute her talent, but I found her style a little overwrought for my taste, and her particular brand of Christianity rather unpleasant (not least, for example, her view on lesbianism as a disgusting sin or, actually, her obsession with sin and grace in general). I know some people like to read her as "ironic", but it is obvious where her sympathies lie.
  
  I found she worked better in the short story form than the novel, particularly when there was enough ambiguity for the reader to read against her.
  
  Knocked up to 4 stars from 3 due to "A good man is hard to find", which is one of the best short stories I have read.
• 
  Callie

  I finished Wise Blood, and I'm now reading some of her letters...For Wise Blood, it's the kind of book you admire, but it requires work and thought and wasn't pure pleasure for me. What I like about it is that it is trying to say something, something big, something existential. Haze Motes character is not as someone else pointed out to O'Connor himself believable as a full human being. She agreed with that. I agree with that too. But it seems to me this book is more of an allegory--you know as you are reading it that these are symbols, even the people are types. Most of people in the novel are not concerned with their souls, but just about making money or mundane issues. A lot of them are out to con people and have only their own interest at heart. Motes and Enoch are different, though. Motes is obsessed with religion and is trying to escape God and Jesus, even as he knows he has been redeemed and they already have a hold on him. Enoch, I thought, at first was just obsessive-compulsive. But upon further reflection and as I read some of O'Connor's commentary on the novel, I realized that he is that rare person who knows how to listen to his inner voice and obeys it. When he shows the shriveled museum man to Motes, he is showing Motes what Man would be without redemption. I am in awe of all the depth here and this is the kind of book that if you read it along with someone else, you could have endless hours of enlightening conversation. I guess that's why it's so well regarded. It pricks at you and makes you want to think about those big questions. I also admire O'Connor so much in that she was both devoted to her religion AND her art. Very difficult in this age of unbelieving. She didn't sacrifice her artistic vision and she wasn't afraid to unsettle devoted Catholics, but she didn't ever shy away from her religion in order to satisfy the intellectual crowd who are usually atheist or at least agnostic. That's why her letters and essays are very educational for a person who has faith and wants to write. She shows it can be done and done well.
  
  I have now read all the letters and most of the essays and I have to add a few quotes I loved. I can't believe her letters were as interesting as they were as I have tried many times to read letters/journals of literary people and usually find them awfully boring. Not hers. Particularly, the ones to A. These were fabulous. I wonder who A. was?
  
  "ONe of the awful things about writing when you are a Christian is that for you the ultimate reality is the INcarnation, the present reality is the INcarnation, the whole reality is the Incarnation, and nobody believes in the INcarnation; that is, nobody in your audience. My audience are the people who think God is dead. At least these are the people I am conscious of writing for."
• 
  Jordan

  Flannery O'Connor is the master of Southern Gothic.
  
  Her tales are full of sociopathic actions and skewed niceties, and will drag you into the darkest corners of the South with a thousand unanswered questions: What drives a man to create the Church without Christ? Why kill an entire family in cold blood? Why steal a lonely girl's wooden leg? The depths of human horror are explored in O'Connor's eloquent and visceral language; she will startle the shit out of you, and your grandmother.
  
  Oh, and there are some letters in this volume. I skipped those, but they're probably amazing.
  
  
  Buy this title from Powell's Books.
• 
  Gonzo

  I came back to Flannery O'Connor's work (this book) after reading a blog post about the role of Christianity in her work. My first reaction to this was, "Flannery O'Connor was Catholic?"--something akin to Homer Simpson's exclamation "Mel Brooks Is Jewish?" In my defense, I first encountered Flannery O'Connor in high school in "Greenleaf," one of the less overtly religious of her stories (Pop quiz: Will the dreaded "n-word" or "Christ" be the first to be completely scrubbed out of our literature?). Flannery O'Connor is a Christian writer, but then again many writers are labeled (accused of?) being Christian. What does this really mean? Flannery O'Connor's brand of Christian fiction is weird. Weirder than any labels applied to her ("Southern gothic," etc.) can really capture, so it's worth thinking about for a while.
  
  First, the volume. The best endorsement of it is that it deserves to exist. How many American authors actually have bodies of work worth reading in full? How many American authors' letters are really worth reading? Nary any. But Flannery O'Connor's work actually deserves to be read as a whole. She was interesting enough, and a great enough artist, for her opinions on life and literature to matter; even her weak work informs us on the strength of her strong work.
  
  Neither of her novels are all that good. Wise Blood is so demented and weird that it's hard not to like it on some level, but overall it never rises above the status of being a bunch of sick scenes intertwined. The Violent Bear it Away is better as a novel (though probably less interesting), though it suffers from the same problems as its predecessor, which is to say, it lacks anything greater to unite the characters and scenes into a larger work. There are many ways in which an author can unite scenes together: For example, characters can develop in a way which allows them to live to live outside the scenes in which they appear; or the the author's composition itself can unite the work as an aesthetic whole. On the matter of character development, never in O'Connor's work is there a character who lives outside his or her assigned role. Her players are driven by certain motivations which provide a center of their entire existences. Very few develop even in a Pavlovian fashion, let alone a Shakespearean one.
  
  The second novel is closer, thematically, at uniting the work as a whole. Unlike the scenes in Wise Blood which are connected only in their perversity, the scenes in Bear it Away operate much better as a thematic whole. Where the first novel was a collection of strange tales, the second tells an overarching story focused upon three characters.
  Of course, what O'Connor gains in thematic consistency she loses in one of her greatest strengths, which is her weirdness. Thus, Bear it Away suffers from being drab.
  
  That leaves us with the stories, which are as good as any written by an American. The stories are the archetypes of a certain mode of short story writing which relies on sudden epiphanies to deliver drama. These often-fatal, mostly ironic epiphanies substitute for the kind of character development we as readers would demand from a novel--the characters in the story are given a comeuppance in the final scene, and forced to confront some aspect of reality they had been able to avoid up until that comeuppance. In this, the reader experiences the kind of psychological angst an author would regularly express through expatiation. Nick Adams's views on death are discovered by the ironic contrast of "The Killers;" Gabriel's views on the same are discovered by late revelation in "The Dead." It can also start to feel like a gimmick--spend 90% creating a character who believes and acts on one belief, crush that belief in the final 10%, and leave the reader in the ironic, ambivalent lurch of modernism.
  
  O'Connor is the master of the ironic comeuppance. It can tend to become predictable; at the worst, it's like a limerick, whose meter overrules the matter; at best, it's like a sonnet, whose meter is imbibed along with the weight of the content. O'Connor mostly achieves the latter, especially in Everything That Rises, which is superior to A Good Man is Hard to Find. Pound for pound, page for page, word for word, O'Connor just does it better. It would nice if short story writers would let enough alone, as far as the epiphany style goes, and let O'Connor rest as queen of the form.
  
  But how does this make her a Christian writer? When I think of Christian writer, I think of Dickens, whose every character exuded love for his fellow man that couldn't be topped in Heaven; Milton, of course lauded Christ. Even George Eliot knew of Christianity's virtues and expressed them better than O'Connor. To be honest, the title of Christian writer as applied to O'Connor is deceiving. O'Connor was certainly a Christian--a devout Catholic--but her stories and characters are out of the Old Testament. It is only through the epiphany mode of storytelling that we realize what her characters are lacking--they lack divine grace, as can only be imparted through Jesus Christ. Her stories are intimately connected, thematically, with her views on and relationship to Christianity.
  
  I would put it like this: O'Connor's South, far from being "Gothic" (whatever that means) is best compared to the world and people of the Book of Genesis. Violence is rampant, and blood cries out from the ground. Like the race of giants that shared land with men, the races of the South live in alienation from one another. The old-timers in O'Connor's stories all have something antebellum in them, making them somewhat akin to Methuselah. Most importantly, they lack a sense of rightness and goodness beyond the particular (often perverted) moral codes which drive their existences. Jacob steals his brother's birthright; Ham defiles his father Noah; the brothers of Dinah commit mass murder to avenge her rape. All these acts form important parts of the development of the history of the Israelites, but it's hard for any civilized person to read about them and not feel unclean. For me, at least, I felt a similar feeling of uncleanliness in reading about the Bible salesman stealing a leg, or a shyster leaving an idiot girl at a bar alone. As the pre-Mosaic peoples lacked a Decalogue, O'Connor's characters lack moral scruples in a way that makes their sins seem almost forgivable, yet no less repellent.
  
  Many of O'Connor's characters are certainly religious, but they are religious in the most heathen way. The main character in "The Lame Shall Enter First" is knowledgeable of Christ's teachings, but possesses no praxis for applying these teachings to his life. The wife in "Parker's Back" can perform every function of Christianity except the one which matters--to love. Southern society is full of Elmer Gantries, such as in "The River." Sometimes this personal religion is enough--Mrs. Greenleaf's fervent religiosity pays off for her, and the Greenleaf family as a whole actually gets close as any O'Connor character to some kind of redemption. But for the most part, we see in these characters something close to moral chaos and nihilism--in both the extreme believers and atheists which populate O'Connor's work.
  
  On one level, this is a searing indictment of Southern Protestantism; in the land of TJ Jakes and Joel Osteen, such condemnation of the never-ending stream of Elmer Gantries coming forth must be never-ending.Even as the Israelites form a great society, they are too weak to avoid false gods and idolatry. But to chalk this up to a Evangelical vs. Catholic (or similar organized churches) is too simple. O'Connor's characters lack grace. In a sense, the lack of inwardness I noted above is a symptom of this. O'Connor's characters possess judgment and morality; what they lack is love for one another (especially O'Connor's monstrous intellectuals), and love for their Creator, which can compel them to act beyond their particular codes and actually achieve right action. It's telling that the Catholics who populate O'Connor's work are usually better-acclimated to the world than their non-Catholic counterparts; the application of their most-unworldly beliefs to the world generally works. This is O'Connor's greatest compliment to the faith.
  
  Perhaps inwardness is a property of the Godhead. O'Connor's characters are all so trapped within their singular compulsions that the reader wishes some kind of self-reflection and growth were possible if only to let them escape from the prisons which are O'Connor's stories. Hell is not other people, but it is the inability to love other people and things, a quality which almost all of O'Connor's characters possess to some extent. How can we love without reflection? How can we find joy in the outer world when we cannot contemplate and fall in love with the visions inside us? In this way, the Shakespearean idea of character--the great souls in chains idea from Chesterton--really takes meaning. Our own egos and personalities arise from the Divine Itself in our attempts to love more fully.
  
  Beyond the theological, other aspects of O'Connor's work are compelling. Though O'Connor, as a Southern author, is of course described as a writer about "race" (who isn't?!), it's hard not to notice that O'Connor's view on race relations is decidedly un-progressive. Faulkner's Negroes are the protectors of an older, simpler, more humane life; Eudora Welty's are victims of near-Nazi-like savagery. O'Connor's are diffident, difficult, and often violent. The last scene in all her completed fiction is of an innocent old man being murdered by a black man riding the ascendance of the Civil Rights movement; there's no way to characterize this in a way that makes the movement or its disciples look good. Interesting, also, is O'Connor's letter disputing whether MLK was as saintlike as he appeared, and noting James Baldwin's insufferability (1208)--funny that MLK would be recognized as having died for our sins with Baldwin as his gospelist, while mention of Christ is further purged from public discourse. Taken together, it's clear that O'Connor held a shaky Old South mentality with regards to race relations. It's somewhat sad that O'Connor died young in 1964. But then again, when it comes to her critical reputation, it may have been a godsend to die before Watts; the modern Church Without Christ is more exacting than Hazel Motes when it comes to punishing its heretics.
• 
  Elle

  I'm "taking" the Yale Open Course in The American Novel Since 1945 (
  http://oyc.yale.edu/english/american-...), and "Wise Blood" is one of the readings. It tells of Hazel Motes, a young man from Tennessee recently returned to the South after several years of fighting overseas. His grandfather was a preacher, and people keep believing he is one. When he does preach, it's outside of movie theaters, and is for the Church Without Christ.
  
  My favorite part is when a man named Holy tries to join him and make it the Holy Church of Christ Without Christ.

  "'Now I want to give you folks a few reasons why you can trust this church,' he said. ... 'You don't have to believe nothing you don't understand and approve of. If you don't understand it, it ain't true, and that's all there is to it. ...I want to tell you a second reason why you can absolutely trust this church--it's based on the Bible. Yes sir! It's based on your own personal interpitation of the Bible, friends. You can sit at home and interpit your own Bible however you feel in your heart it ought to be interpited. That's right, ' he said, 'just the way Jesus would have done it. ... That ought to be enough reasons, friends,' Ornie Jay Holy said, 'but I'm going to tell you one more, just to show I can. This church is up-to-date! When you're in this church you can know that there's nothing or nobody ahead of you, nobody knows nothing you don't know, all the cards are on the table, friends, and that's a fack!'"

  
  
  The story also suggests that might be a different way to keep Sabbath, but you'll have to read it to discover that for yourself.
  
  The story reminds me a little of Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory and The End of the Affair in its suggestion of a kind of sainthood or Christ-likeness in the most unlikely person/people. Yet Greene had nothing on O'Connor when it came to a truly dark and twisted vision of humanity. I don't seem to read her stories, but be seared by them. It will take me much longer to digest this one, but on the surface now, after having just finished it, and seeing "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" follows, I admit that this story was not as powerful to me as "A Good Man." This story I may eventually recover from; that, never. And I can't even see the title without remembering what the professor who introduced me to "A Good Man" would quote of O'Connor on her own work--that "for the almost deaf, you shout, and for the almost blind, you draw large and startling pictures."
  
  I gave the story two stars based on how much I enjoyed it, not on how good it is. My enjoyment is not the most important measure, just the only one you can't know unless I share it.
• 
  Walter

  This certainly was a load of a book. I don’t have a problem with the writing which is pretty good or the content of the stories. But I don’t think any of her writing is insightful or intelligent. She knows how to hide her lack of insight. That’s a talent, I guess.
  
  Her style reminds me of that family member prone to box wine who has mastered the way to tell a story without ever having experienced life for himself; slow and meandering in their rendering of the story that usually sounds interesting the first couple of times you hear them talk but after a couple years you realize they have nothing to say.
  They’ve seen nothing. Felt nothing.
  
  The pose questions like, “Well, you wouldn’t believe what happened today.”
  
  “Where?”
  
  “At work…”
  
  “When…”
  
  “Just before the dawn…”
  
  “What happened?”
  
  “…wouldn’t you like to know…”
  
  “Tell me.”
  
  “I don’t know if you’re ready.”
  
  “I am, ready.”
  
  “Can I trust you?”
  
  “Sure.”
  
  “Or can anyone be trusted.”
  
  “I don’t know.”
  
  “Yes…No One Does!” They pause. “Can you get me some more red wine?”
  
  “Sure.” Hand them a glass.
  
  
  “Well, he walked up to me, grizzled like.”
  
  “Who?”
  
  “He had a funny way-uh-talking. Like he’d seen too much.”
  
  
  “What did he see?”
  
  Long gulp of wine. “Things Man Shouldn’t See.”
  
  “Like what?”
  
  “Time will tell.”
  
  “Can you tell me now?”
  
  “I wish I could, I wish I could.”
  
  And so on. Nothing is said. There is lots of subtext in the above dialogue. So what? And the wine was red so I suppose you could say it’s Christ’s Blood. But so what? It’s still a dumb conversation. Like her writing.
  
• 
  Christine Christman

  
  
  When I began reading this book O didn't know if I was going to make it through. But eventually I got tot the point where I was picking it up every free minute I had. Why. I think it was because I began to get to know her characters. You know how when you first meet people it is easy to make all of these judgments about them...that defensive posture...but then when you get to know them the judgments fall away because you get to see what is behind the behaviors or attitudes being judged? That's how I experienced her stories. At first...agh! This is horrifying...people dismembering their faces, getting murdered because of a random wrong turn, stealing a wooden leg, drowning a disabled child. But she draws the characters so objectively that I began to get more and more curious about how they would work out the details of their lives which were so different from my own. Would I want to know these people in my life? Probably not. But human choices and motives are always interesting to me and oConnor paints her characters in such a way that you can feel the disturbance bubbling to the surface but you never know how it's going to play out. A tension building that I found captivating.
  
  Mostly, however, I enjoyed her essays on literature, writing, Catholicism, and the grotesque. After seeing the intelligent thought behind her writing I appreciate what Oconnor was about and her own self-consciousness about it.
• 
  Steven

  Volumes like this are the glory of the Library of America. All the Flannery O'Connor you need in one well edited, perfectly sized edition. And you do need to read Flannery O'Connor. As a devout Catholic living in the gaudy sectarian carnival of the Protestant South, O'Connor had a unique perspective on religion and its unpredictable power. Though I will always be fond of Wise Blood and Hazel Motes ("I preach the Church Without Christ where the blind don't see, the lame don't walk, and what's dead stays that way.") I think the real greatness is in the short stories. "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" is an acknowledged classic, but I often return to "The River," in which a neglected boy's baptism leads to a catastrophic accident, or the doctor's office from hell in "Revelation." O'Connor is one of the greats, and this volume is a great way to study her work.
• 
  Curt Jarrell

  One of the 2oth Century's most influential and fiercely original talents, O'Connor is not to be dismissed lightly. Her sharp wit and even sharper prose is on display in this collection of her work. It's a pity she was taken from us at such a young age of only 39. I prefer her shorter works, including her essays and letters and her short fiction, my favorite being "Good Country People," about a shady salesman looking to pick up something extra at a sales call in a rural area, and it isn't what you think.
• 
  Mommalibrarian

  Flannery O'Connor is a shock-jock. She writes powerful, twisted, decadent stories about warped, exaggerated, monstrous people committing extreme actions. Although the stories are set in the south I am sure freaks can be found in every part of the world.
• 
  Alicia

  I loved Wise Blood! The essays are wonderful. This book is my favorite gift to myself.
• 
  Kelly

  I'm going to have to buy this book -- I was reading a library copy and had to give it back before I finished.
• 
  Olav Nilsen

  “Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it”
• 
  Elizabeth

  Treasures...
• 
  James Violand

  Wise Blood
  An imbecilic degenerate with a religious chip on his shoulder, attempts to build a new church of no Jesus, meets other irredeemable characters in a small Southern city and dies. Not a story worth its ink.
  A Good Man Is Hard To Find
  You’re in a restaurant. Your ordered food arrives. Your first bite tells you something is wrong. You take a second and your nerve reflex is to vomit. Do you continue to eat? Hell no. This author sucks. I don’t know what rock she crept out from under, nor do I have any idea why she has been promoted as a good writer. The first three shorts concern an escaped convict murdering an unfortunate family of two small children, a grandmother and husband and wife; the second is about an unwanted eight-year-old boy who is abused and drowns in a river and; the third describes how a one-armed vagrant defrauds an impoverished widow and her deaf 30-year-old daughter. What is the point of writing this diarrhea? It elevates no one, nor does it entertain. Rather, it presents a hopeless alienation of the soul. So why read it? Why continue reading The Collected Works of Flannery O'Connor? I have no doubt that, in a few decades, the average reader will reject her works and those of the other current favorable modernist writers as complete garbage and a mere fraud perpetrated by elite sycophants of prestigious writers who hate humanity.
  
• 
  Dave N

  Previously, I'd only read her first novel, Wise Blood, and I'd given it a somewhat poor rating. I take it back. I think I've come to appreciate that first novel much more now that I've read more about O'Conner and her thoughts on Southern writing and its role in portraying the "freaks" in society. That said, I really think her second novel, The Violent Bear it Away, is really her stand-out work. Don't get me wrong, her short stories are fantastic at times, but I really think she shines in that second novel. Tarwater is such a great character and his uncle makes such a great foil. I'll admit that the pattern of the novel is a bit formulaic (you could match it to a number of works by other writers), but I don't think that takes away from the writing itself, which is superb.
  
  Of her short stories, I found myself drawn more by the quieter ones that her more famous works like "A Good Man Is Hard to Find". The stories that take place on small farms, with people just trying to get by ("Greenleaf" is a good example) but dealing with little issues felt more real. That said, my favorite was probably "A View of the Woods", maybe because it reminded me of The Violent Bear It Away in its themes.
  
  I skipped reading her complete letters, though I'd like to go back and finish them eventually. She wrote beautifully, and had a sort of Churchillian way of always having a memorable line or two stored for just the right moment.
• 
  Arthur

  In my 27-year tenure as an English professor at Georgia College in Milledgeville, I taught the stories of Flannery O'Connor (alumna of the college and resident of the town) more times than I count. To avoid looking like a bumpkin at the O'Connor conference in Savannah last month, I thought I should re-read the works I had read and taught and read the works I had not read before. I had an engaging six weeks. O'Connor's prose in her fiction is often dense and complicated; speed reading is not advised. Her use of the epiphany as a plot device is brilliant. She skillfully manipulates fundamentalist language to illustrate very Catholic notions of grace. The comedy in her stories inevitably leads to the humiliation and subsequent glorification of characters with superficial faith or no faith at all. My favorite stories are my old favorites Wise Blood, "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," "Good Country People," and "Revelation"--and a new favorite "The Partridge Festival." O'Connor did not have social media to entertain her, but she was a prolific letter writer. The letters are a delight. Their subjects range from chatty gossip to serious theology. Her essays are insightful and worth re-reading.
• 
  Bobby Lehew

  I have so little time for thoughtful review; instead, I opt for a series of favorite passages from each book; (my apologies to authors everywhere for confounding intent by taking these out of context!) -
  
  "There is another reason in the Southern situation that makes for a tendency toward the grotesque and this is the prevalence of good Southern writers. I think the writer is initially set going by literature more than by life. When there are many writers all employing the sale idiom, all looking out on more or less the same social scene, the individual writer will have to be more than ever careful that he isn't just doing badly what has already been done to completion. The presence alone of Faulkner in our midst makes a great difference in what the writer can and cannot permit himself to do. Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down." - from "The Grotesque in Southern Fiction"
• 
  Paul Jellinek

  This is my second reading of this extraordinary volume of the writings of one of America's greatest writers--and the first time that I read all the remarkable letters that comprise the final third of the book--but it won't be my last. There is so much depth to these novels and stories, and so much wisdom and humor in the letters--some of which shed invaluable light on the novels and stories--that I will undoubtedly return to them again and again. As her letters reveal, none of these novels or stories came easy to O'Connor; she had to dig deep into her unconscious for the profound truths that animate each one of them. That is what makes them both so challenging to read and ultimately so rewarding.
• 
  James Henderson

  The writing style of Flannery O'Connor awakens the reader with its felicity. Miss O'Connor imagination takes over from there and the ride is a wild one. Wise Blood, the first work in this collection, is a nightmarish take on the world of southern itenerant preachers. Hazel Motes' Church without Christ is a bleakly humorous approach to the whole god/man situation and Motes own psychology is worth studying through rereadings of this short work. The collections of short fiction underscore the ability of O'Connor to surprise and challenge the reader. I find myself returning to her work from time to time just to make sure that my previous readings were not a dream.
  
• 
  Lorna

  I am fascinated by the writings of Flannery O'Connor. She exaggerates people's not so good charaters traits to make a point concerning issues such a racism, selfishness, intolerance, etc. Her stories are full of irony and often have shocking endings. We visited her home in Milledgeville, Georgia where she lived and wrote for many years. This was interesting to me as my son-in-law, Ben is from Milledgeville.
• 
  pearl

  I like Southern writers. Don't really know why. Maybe I just gravitate toward dialects, oppression, freakish humor, madness, and deeply (but beautifully) flawed people. Shall Flannery O'Connor be the answer I've been waiting for, to Faulkner and McCullers?
  
  Anyway I'm two short stories and one novel in (A Good Man Is Hard to Find, Everything that Rises Must Converge, Wise Blood) and yes, I do think I've taken a shining to this Flannery woman.
  
  Awesome. Full review(s) later!
• 
  Arwen Downs

  I will not explain Flannery O'Connor. You must read Flannery O'Connor, because your life will be better.
  
  (Even the letters are worth reading, and you cannot say that about everyone whose letters are published.)
• 
  Kevin Ryan

  She was one of the most gifted writers in America. She combines a gothic Southern sensibility with a fascination for human failure and the mystical. She brings you to places and outcomes you don't expect but seem completely perfect once you are there.
• 
  Martin Bihl

  Wise Blood - finished 05.17.14
  
  A Good Man is Hard to Find - finished 03.02.15
  
  The Violent Bear It Away - finished 02.25.16
  
  Everything That Rises Must Converge - finished 03.17.17
  
  Stories and Occasional Prose - finished 04.13.18
  
  Letters - finished 09.27.19