The Complete Short Stories (Flannery O’Connor)

All thirty-one of O’Connor’s short stories in one posthumous volume, published in 1971 and awarded the National Book Award the following year: the two collections she saw into print (A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Everything That Rises Must Converge), the stories from her master’s thesis at Iowa, and unpublished work. A devout Catholic writing about the rural South, she built almost every story the same way — an ordinary, self-satisfied person is brought to a violent or grotesque moment that functions as an offer of grace.

Why it’s on the list: Assigned in UATX’s “Writing and the English Language” course alongside Wright, Morrison and Wolff — a syllabus of short American prose read for craft, and O’Connor’s stories are the standard case study in how much a story can do with structure and a final sentence.

Where I saw it: The University of Austin’s Fall 2025 reading list, 65 Texts Our Students Are Reading, published November 13 2025 and saved to Kyle’s “Books To Read” Apple Note. The full 65-text curriculum is transcribed on UATX Fall Reading List.

Connections

• UATX Fall Reading List — the curriculum this is assigned in.
• Flannery O’Connor — already in the wiki, where she recurs through two quotations: “I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say,” and her line on the cost of faith — “they think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it’s a cross.”
• Grace — the theological idea her stories are built around.
• Literature — part of the canon this list is built around.