Hers & His

This Sunday's nytimes featured an article championing the American Short Story and some of its great writers. The famous, and well used, typewriters above are master machines belonging to Flannery O'Connor and Donald Barthelme. Click here to read the full article.

If you are an O'Connor fan like me you will be keen to get your hands on a copy of Brad Gooch's new biography, Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor, exploring the unsung chapters and quiet complexities of this Southern spitfire's creative and personal life. I had no idea she only lived to the age of 38.

Joyce Carol Oates wrote a whipsmart review of Gooch's book in the wider context of O'Connor's literary legacy in the New York Review of Books. O'Connor's lifelong passion for peacocks (as celebrated on the book covers above) is measured alongside her unsentimental prose and biting wit: "She would of been a good woman -- if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life." (From the title story in A Good Man Is Hard To Find, 1955.) To read an extended excerpt from this story, click here.