Recommendations
Books Like Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor
Flannery O'Connor fiction, Southern Gothic Catholic novels, and books about grace in violent form
If Wise Blood transfixed you with Hazel Motes's doomed resistance to his own belief and O'Connor's sense that grace arrives in the most violent and grotesque forms, these eight works share her theological intensity, her dark comedy, and her conviction that the grotesque is the only honest mode for depicting a fallen world.
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Buy on AmazonThe Violent Bear It Away
by Flannery O'Connor
O'Connor's second novel — Francis Marion Tarwater's attempted escape from his prophetic calling, ending in drowning-baptism and violent grace; the necessary companion to Wise Blood in understanding O'Connor's theological vision.
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Buy on AmazonA Good Man Is Hard to Find
by Flannery O'Connor
O'Connor's first story collection — 'A Good Man Is Hard to Find', 'Good Country People', 'The Life You Save May Be Your Own'; the fullest expression of her short fiction genius and the best single volume for new O'Connor readers.
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Buy on AmazonThe Complete Stories
by Flannery O'Connor
All thirty-one stories — essential O'Connor, including 'Revelation', 'Parker's Back', 'The Artificial Nigger'; the National Book Award winner; the definitive collection.
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Buy on AmazonAs I Lay Dying
by William Faulkner
Faulkner's tragicomic Southern novel — the Bundren family's absurd journey; the Southern grotesque tradition that O'Connor inherited and transformed through her Catholic theological lens.
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Buy on AmazonBlood Meridian
by Cormac McCarthy
McCarthy's violent border epic — the most extreme version of the Southern/Southwestern Gothic violence that O'Connor used more sparingly; both writers use violence as a form of revelation.
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Buy on AmazonThe Power and the Glory
by Graham Greene
Greene's Catholic novel of a 'whiskey priest' hunted by the Mexican government — the most direct Catholic literary parallel to O'Connor; both center on a broken vessel through whom grace moves despite the vessel's unworthiness.
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Buy on AmazonThe Moviegoer
by Walker Percy
Percy's New Orleans existentialist novel — the Southern Catholic literary tradition from which O'Connor's grotesque is the violent wing and Percy's irony is the more urbane; both are indebted to Kierkegaard.
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Buy on AmazonLolita
by Vladimir Nabokov
Nabokov's confession novel from the same decade — a different kind of darkness, a different kind of unreliable narrator whose self-justification the reader must see through; both novels demand that the reader maintain moral judgment against the narrator's own claims.
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