Comforts
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What will you find here?

Comforts of Home focuses on Flannery O'Connor related information evaluated for its reliability and usefulness: links to biographical information about Flannery O'Connor, critical analysis of her work, and general praise of her abilities as a writer and a human being. If you're searching for essays and other scholarship on Flannery O'Connor published on the Web, we try to catch everything that we think is truly helpful. Be aware that most critical analysis of O'Connor is in hard-copy (see: Offline Resources).

News for July

I've been pointed to a Library of America interview with Brad Gooch, author of the recent Flannery: a Life of Flannery O'Connor. (See below for a review of the book.) The conversation touches on O'Connor's motivations, aspirations and personal life, but it's not particularly revealing if you've read The Habit of Being, so you'll have to get Gooch's book if you want to see how he treats any of these topics in-depth.  

Blake Bailey gives a delightful review of Flannery: a Life of Flannery O’Connor (thanks to Waldo Jaquith of the Virginia Quarterly Review for telling me about it), and Joseph O'Neill of the Atlantic sort-of reviews Gooch's book but gets caught up in the spiritual drama in O'Connor's fiction (which isn't a bad thing).

FINALLY! Wise Blood has made it to DVD. For a very reasonable $29.99, you can enjoy John Huston's screen interpretation of O'Connor's first novel on a Criterion Collection disc pressed from a restored print. If you're wondering what all the excitement is about, read Francine Prose's film essay, Wise Blood: a Matter of Life and Death. There's also a review of the Wise Blood DVD at Slant.

No estoy seguro del número de mis visitantes hispanoparlantes, pero si usted lo es, este blog sobre O'Connor contiene comentarios sobre su obra, críticas de estudiosos y enlaces.

Between 1971 and the present, Joyce Carol Oates has written several essays on O'Connor's prose, fiction and letters, which are collected on Oates' University of San Francisco website for your reading pleasure.  (Thank Randy Souther for informing us about this treasure.)

When lupus forced O'Connor to retire to Andalusia, she spent three hours in front of the typewriter each morning, whether she wrote anything or not. In her time on the farm, O'Connor not only produced a body of fiction, but kept up a copious correspondence with over thirty people. In "Flannery O’Connor’s Written Correspondence: An Inside Glimpse at the Forging of Art and Persona" Gretchen Dobrott Bernard considers the ramifications of written exchange as reflected in the friendships O'Connor cultivated with Maryat Lee and Betty Hester.

We've noticed a rising interested in film adaptations of O'Connor's fiction, and while Hollywood hasn't taken up the challenge recently (which might be a good thing), several productions have already translated O'Connor's stories to the screen.

Thanks to the efforts of the Flannery O'Connor-Adalusia Foundation anyone can now visit Andalusia, the farm where O'Connor spent much of her adult life and wrote most of her stories.

Educators take note of this online resource. While it contains an immense amount of helpful information about American literature, our interest in the electronic resources of the Heath Anthology of American Literature lies in their Instructor's Guide to building a course or unit on Flannery O'Connor. This well thought out guide covers classroom strategies, discussion questions, major themes, and a concise bibliography.

Biography: Who was Mary Flannery O'Connor?

Online Essays: Criticism of O'Connor's work on the Internet. Many of these are "scholarly," but there are several non-academic articles here as well, so be careful if you use them for a paper.

Offline Essays: A bibliography of print resources. Most of these are in journals, and as far as I know they are academic, not popular articles.

Books : Works by and about O'Connor available online or at your local bookstore.

(If you want to see everything Amazon offers on O'Connor, you can test drive this new connection I'm working on that automatically searches for anything tagged Flannery O'Connor.)

Other Sites: The requisite "links" page. Don't waste your time searching for O'Connor sites on the net, just click here.

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