"Flannery O'Connor and the Mystery of Love interprets O'Connor's perplexing fiction on its own terms. By stepping back from prevailing controversies, this seminal study takes the pleasure of turning to the short stories and novels themselves and forming an impression of them while seeking the answers to such questions as they necessarily suggest themselves. This goal inevitably entails a consideration of the hardness and violence that are the hallmark of O'Connor's genius. That severity, for Giannone, is inseparable from O'Connor's recounting, in her words, "the action of grace." God's bounty can leave its beneficiaries with some very real handicaps." "These devastations paradoxically prepare the characters to receive and give compassion. In its numerous and disturbing forms, the coupling of violence and hardship with divine favor marks the mature nature of O'Connor's Christianity." --Book Jacket.

Focusing on O'Connor's spirituality, Giannone examines the central relationships between guilt and love in O'Connor's fiction ; argues that O'Connor's aim was to explore the impact of divine love on her characters.

This collection shows Flannery O'Connor's extraordinary versatility and expertise as a practitioner of the essayistic form. The book opens with "The King of the Birds", her famous account of raising peacocks. There are three essays on regional writing, two on teaching literature, and four on the writer and religion. Essays such as "The Nature and Aim of Fiction" and "Writing Short Stories" are gems, and their value to the contemporary reader -- and writer -- is inestimable. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

Flannery O'Connor and Stylistic Asceticism explores the impact style has not only on a story's meaning, but on the reading experience. O'Connor's sparingly wrought stories, particularly in their climactic moments of divine disclosure, invite characters and readers alike into invitations of graced encounters that often wound even as they bless. Flannery O'Connor and Stylistic Asceticism draws out the force and vulnerability in reading spare stories of graced encounters by identifying a kinship with a much older form of storytelling: biblical Hebrew narrative. Focusing on the climactic scenes of O'Connor's Wise Blood and Genesis 32's account of Jacob's nighttime wrestling, Rachel Toombs offers a fresh take on the theological impact of spare narration. These stories invite readers into a posture akin to prayer where in an uncluttered space we see ourselves as we truly are and there meet God.

The Incarnational Art of Flannery O'Connor argues that O'Connor designed a unique asthetic to defy the Gnostic dualisms that characterize American intellectual and spiritual life. Focusing on stories with artist figures, objets d'art, child protagonists, and embodied images, Lake describes how O'Connor's fiction actively resisted romantic theories of the imagination and religious life by highlighting the epistemological necessity of the body. Ultimately O'Connor challenges the romantic and modern notion of the artist as a fire-stealing Prometheus and replaces it with a notion of the artist as a locally committed craftsman. Drawing upon M. M. Bakhtin's early essays in Art and Answerability and Toward a Philosophy of the Act, Lake illustrates O'Connor's conviction that art deliberately assigns the highest value of transcendental beauty to those beings least valued by the modern world, and challenges us to do the same. The book culminates with an original reading of Parker's Back that shows how in art, as in life, true knowledge comes to us through our own grotesque bodies and those of others. Unafraid of the mystery of being human, art can be the place where we encounter anew the world as more than what the intellect can unravel.

In this funny, brainy, thoroughly engaging debut collection, an award-winning writer looks at romance through the lens of scholarly theories to illuminate love in the information age. In ten captivating and tender stories, E. J. Levy takes readers through the surprisingly erotic terrain of the intellect, offering a smart and modern take on the age-old theme of love--whether between a man and woman, a man and a man, a woman and a woman, or a mother and a child--drawing readers into tales of passion, adultery, and heartbreak. A disheartened English professor's life changes when she goes rock climbing and falls for an outdoorsman. A gay oncologist attending his sister's second wedding ponders dark matter in the universe and the ties that bind us. Three psychiatric patients, each convinced that he is Christ, give rise to a love affair in a small Minnesota town. A Brooklyn woman is thrown out of an ashram for choosing earthly love over enlightenment. A lesbian student of film learns theories of dramatic action the hard way--by falling for a married male professor. Incorporating theories from physics to film to philosophy, from Rational Choice to Thorstein Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class, these stories movingly explore the heart and mind--shooting cupid's arrow toward a target that may never be reached.