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“... and New York were invaluable experiences, but like a number of brilliant American provincials – Flannery O’Connor and Eudora Welty come to mind – Niedecker took what she needed and returned home. She made several further trips to the city in the mid-1930s to visit Zukofsky and Reisman, and they made a pilgrimage to Black Hawk Island in 1936, but ...”

“... steaks, baked potatoes, salads with ‘knobs of cheese’; there are jokes about textuality and Flannery O’Connor, and an emergent tragicomedy about Bill’s relationship with the ex-student, ‘unattractive and self-conscious making but not illegal’. Except that weirdly, stealthily, the story becomes also a disquisition on Serbs and Bosnians and ...”

“... rich New York matrons. They made clear that Capote had real talent but no real terrain. He lacked Flannery O’Connor’s steely wit or Eudora Welty’s sharp knowledge of her neighbours. It is interesting that the name Flannery O’Connor never once appears in his letters; she would have put the fear of God into ...”

“... psychological states. A character hasn’t been characterised enough in the first section for his Flannery O’Connor ending in the second to come either as a surprise or a logical extension of what we already know: he’s bitten by a cobra while trying to beat the world record for living in a glass case full of cobras, an attempt undertaken both as a ...”

“... himself as being ‘in charge of the bad times’, could be a travelling salesman out of a Flannery O’Connor story, though in a Norwegian literary context Solstad is more likely to be inverting a narrative trope of Knut Hamsun’s, the arrival of an enigmatic, vital young man in a sleepy town. Eyde, as exaggeratedly particularised as Singer is ...”

“... without further elucidation this comes across as lazy, almost random. Why not Harry Crews? Why not Flannery O’Connor? Why not (note the initials) Edgar Allan Poe? Why not the Beverley Hillbillies? Elvis, Tennessee Williams, Faulkner: can you think of three less similar people? Even the fact of their Southern birth doesn’t really haunt their work in ...”

“... kiss, wander past the shops selling Indian-print scarves or punk bootlegs, buy Greil Marcus and Flannery O’Connor books, visit pubs. ‘It was rare to see anyone over forty, as if there were a curfew for older people.’ This, for Shahid, is the life – the clamour and congestion for which an Asian upbringing had left him gasping. Perhaps the most ...”

“... of robin funerals, of that kid who wants to feel the feeling, something you don’t get with, say, Flannery O’Connor, who might actually have killed people. Then again, robin funerals are kind of the business: a little thing to put in a box, so that the rest of us can be glad to feel alive.Short fiction is a cruel form. It is life in miniature: not ...”

“... to be told.’ The anxieties generated by this misguided piece of pedagogy are illustrated in Flannery O’Connor’s ‘The Crop’, a story about the laughable efforts of an ‘amateur “penwoman”’ to find a subject for a story: ‘There were so many subjects to write stories about that Miss Willerton never could think of one. That was always ...”