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From Stephen Elliott
You know what Ernest Hemingway looked like and what his writing sounded like—but what did he smell like?
Inspired by a perfume on Etsy called “Dead Writers,” Book Riot’s Amanda Nelson imagines scents named after various canonical authors.
Our favorites include Flannery O’Connor (“Church incense, soap, vanilla, ginger”) and Edgar Allen Poe (“Poppies, absinthe, sandalwood, and mold”).
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Timothy Leo Taranto illustrates some of literature’s greats, including David Foster Wallace and Gromit, Flan-nery O’Connor, and John Frankensteinbeck.
...moreFor the Atlantic‘s “By Heart,” “a series in which authors share and discuss their all-time favorite passages in literature,” Jim Shepard discusses Flannery O’Connor, James Joyce, and the painfully fleeting nature of epiphany:
...moreThis kind of conversion notion is based on a very comforting idea—that if only we had sufficient information, we wouldn’t act badly.
Apparently, as a college student, O’Connor developed a taste for making linoleum cuts, which appeared in the college’s newspaper along with awesomely quipy captions directed at the pompousness of student life and the faculty.
Barry Moser, who is writing the introduction to the upcoming book on O’Connor’s early art, likens her linoleum technique and general temperament to her keen eye for gesture: All the poses her figures strike seem realistic, despite her rarely using references.
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The great Southern novelist and story writer William Gay died at his home in Hohenwald, Tennessee, on February 23rd of this year, at the age of 70.
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Most people writing to their favorite authors do not, I’d guess, think they will get an answer back, and perhaps Betty Hester didn’t either. She was not a scholar and she was not a writer, herself. She was a 32-year-old clerk at a credit bureau in Atlanta the first time she wrote to Flannery O’Connor, in the middle of July 1955.
...moreIn light of a forthcoming publication of Flannery O’Connor’s early drawings, this Guardian article takes a look at her cartoons.
The drawings—taken from the author’s high school and undergraduate years—are characterized as “O’Connor’s entry point to creativity” and reveal the beginnings of “the darkness” that would become central to her fiction.
...moreBefore I say anything about book blog land today, I want to thank Brian Spears, our Poetry and Saturday Editor here at The Rumpus, for putting together some of the best information on Haiti I’ve been able to find anywhere.
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In a new biography, Brad Gooch makes romantic assumptions about the relationship between O’Connor’s life and art.
“I don’t think virtue has a downside. I think human nature does… There’s something heroic to me about people taking risks for the sake of this fragile and intangible thing.”
“That gorgeous cholla cactus outside the window also has horribly sharp spines. The desert is an incredibly violent environment. Plants and animals had to get mean as hell in order to survive.”