Book picks similar to
A Circle in the Fire and Other Stories by Flannery O'Connor


short-stories
literature
fiction
read-as-part-of-collection

The Body Snatcher


Robert Louis Stevenson - 1884
    Jekyll and Mr. HydeMedical school students Fettes and Macfarlane are charged with the unenviable task of receiving and paying for the institution’s research cadavers. When Fettes recognizes the dead body of a woman he saw alive and well just the day before, he suspects murder. Macfarlane, however, insists that the authorities would never believe they had nothing to do with her death. Reluctantly, Fettes agrees to keep quiet, but soon regrets his decision when another familiar corpse turns up—and takes on a life of its own.

The Oxford Book of Short Stories


V.S. Pritchett - 1981
    S. Pritchett, one of our greatest short story writers, has chosen forty-one stories from nine countries written in the English language for this volume, producing a collection that successfully displays the wealth and variety of an art that spans some 200 years.The United States, Great Britain, and Ireland have fine traditions of short story writing that have developed from the time of Sir Walter Scott and Nathaniel Hawthorne. In the twentieth century the art was perfected by Ernest Hemingway, D. H. Lawrence, W. Somerset Maugham, John Updike, and V. S. Pritchett himself. Other contributions in the book come from such masters as James Joyce, Mark Twain, Henry James, Rudyard Kipling, Frank O'Connor, H. E. Bates, William Trevor, and Liam O'Flaherty. Now, the collection of short story masters extends to Canadian, Indian, New Zealander, and Australian writers, who show in the works included here the full range of invention and ability in a genre that continues to flourish.

The Human Comedy


William Saroyan - 1943
    The time is World War II. The family is the Macauley's -- a mother, sister, and three brothers whose struggles and dreams reflect those of America's second-generation immigrants.. In particular, fourteen-year-old Homer, determined to become one of the fastest telegraph messengers in the West, finds himself caught between reality and illusion as delivering his messages of wartime death, love, and money brings him face-to-face with human emotion at its most naked and raw. Gentle, poignant and richly autobiographical, this delightful novel shows us the boy becoming the man in a world that even in the midst of war, appears sweeter, safer and more livable than out own.

The Selected Stories


Richard Bausch - 1996
    "He brings to life characters and situations as vivid and compelling as any in contemporary literature."--Michael Dorris, The Washington Post Book World.

Gone


Colum McCann - 2014
    Author of the New York Times bestsellers “Let the Great World Spin” and “Transatlantic,” McCann has been called “a giant among us” (Peter Carey), “dazzlingly talented” (O: The Oprah Magazine), and “that rare species in contemporary fiction: a literary writer who is an exceptional storyteller” (The Independent). He’s received a National Book Award, an Oscar nomination, and a slew of international prizes. His talents are on full display in his new short story, “Gone,” a deeply affecting literary thriller about a mother and son, alone in a cottage on the west coast of Ireland, and the search that ensues when the boy—whom she adopted years before, deaf and with “already a whole history written in him”—goes missing. He slips away in early morning, down to the cold sea with his new Christmas wetsuit, and as the hours and days drag on, the coast guard, police, dogs, fishermen, farmers, and schoolchildren holding hands search the sea and walk the fields while the television crews and detectives come and go, the police at the cottage seeming to “ghost into one another: almost as if they could slip into one another’s faces.” The mother, Rebecca, now under suspicion, is racked with guilt over the decisions that led to her son’s disappearance, and tormented by the judgment of others: "You bought what? A wetsuit? Why in the world? What sort of mother? How much wine did you drink?" For Rebecca, “every outcome was unwhisperable.” “Gone” is a charged narrative that propels you forward, heart in your throat, and a moving, intimate look at life’s struggles toward grace and a kind of redemption.

James Joyce's Dubliners


Harold Bloom - 2000
    -- Presents the most important 20th-century criticism on major works from The Odyssey through modern literature-- The critical essays reflect a variety of schools of criticism-- Contains critical biographies, notes on the contributing critics, a chronology of the author's life, and an index

Flowers for Algernon


Daniel Keyes - 1959
    In diary entries, Charlie tells how a brain operation increases his IQ and changes his life. As the experimental procedure takes effect, Charlie's intelligence expands until it surpasses that of the doctors who engineered his metamorphosis. The experiment seems to be a scientific breakthrough of paramount importance until Algernon begins his sudden, unexpected deterioration. Will the same happen to Charlie?

The Good Earth


Pearl S. Buck - 1931
    The humble Wang Lung glories in the soil he works, nurturing the land as it nurtures him and his family. Nearby, the nobles of the House of Hwang consider themselves above the land and its workers; but they will soon meet their own downfall.Hard times come upon Wang Lung and his family when flood and drought force them to seek work in the city. The working people riot, breaking into the homes of the rich and forcing them to flee. When Wang Lung shows mercy to one noble and is rewarded, he begins to rise in the world, even as the House of Hwang falls.

Twelve Angry Men


Reginald Rose - 1954
    legal system. The play centers on Juror Eight, who is at first the sole holdout in an 11-1 guilty vote. Eight sets his sights not on proving the other jurors wrong but rather on getting them to look at the situation in a clear-eyed way not affected by their personal prejudices or biases. Reginald Rose deliberately and carefully peels away the layers of artifice from the men and allows a fuller picture to form of them—and of America, at its best and worst.   After the critically acclaimed teleplay aired in 1954, this landmark American drama went on to become a cinematic masterpiece in 1957 starring Henry Fonda, for which Rose wrote the adaptation. More recently, Twelve Angry Men had a successful, and award-winning, run on Broadway.For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Fever


John Edgar Wideman - 1989
    By turns subtle and intense, disturbing and elusive, the stories in this collection are ultimately connected by themes of memory and loss, reality and fabrication, and by a richless of language that rests lightly on its carefully foundation.

Cane


Jean Toomer - 1923
    The sketches, poems, and stories of black rural and urban life that make up Cane are rich in imagery. Visions of smoke, sugarcane, dusk, and flame permeate the Southern landscape: the Northern world is pictured as a harsher reality of asphalt streets. Impressionistic, sometimes surrealistic, the pieces are redolent of nature and Africa, with sensuous appeals to eye and ear.

A Death in the Family


James Agee - 1957
    As Jay Follet hurries back to his home in Knoxville, Tennessee, he is killed in a car accident--a tragedy that destroys not only a life but also the domestic happiness and contentment of a young family. A novel of great courage, lyric force, and powerful emotion, A Death in the Family is a masterpiece of American literature.

The Glass Menagerie


Tennessee Williams - 1945
    As Williams's first popular success, it launched the brilliant, if somewhat controversial, career, of our pre-eminent lyric playwright. Since its premiere in Chicago in 1944, with the legendary Laurette Taylor in the role of Amanda, Menagaerie has been the bravura piece for great actresses from Jessica Tandy to Joanne Woodward, and is studied and performed in classrooms and theatres around the world. The Glass Menagerie (in the reading text the author preferred) is now available only in its New Directions Paperbook edition. A new introduction by the editor of The Tennessee Williams Annual Review, Robert Bray, reappraises the play more than half a century after it won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. This edition of The Glass Menagerie also includes Williams's essay on the impact of sudden fame on a struggling writer, "The Catastrophe of Success," as well as a short section of Williams's own "Production Notes." (back cover)

All the King's Men


Robert Penn Warren - 1946
    Willie Stark, Warren’s lightly disguised version of Huey Long, the one time Louisiana strongman/governor, begins as a genuine tribune of the people and ends as a murderous populist demagogue. Jack Burden is his press agent, who carries out the boss’s orders, first without objection, then in the face of his own increasingly troubled conscience. And the politics? For Warren, that’s simply the arena most likely to prove that man is a fallen creature. Which it does.

Fairy Tales by Ion Creanga: Harap Alb, Ivan Turbinca, Danila Prepeleac, the Goat and Her Three Kids


Books LLC - 2010
    Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 42. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: "Harap Alb" or "Harap-Alb" (Romanian pronunciation: ), known in full as Povestea lui Harap Alb ("The Story of Harap Alb"), is a Romanian-language fairy tale. Based on traditional themes found in Romanian folklore, it was recorded and reworked in 1877 by writer Ion Creang, becoming one of his main contributions to fantasy and Romanian literature. The narrative centers on an eponymous prince traveling into a faraway land whose throne he has inherited, showing him being made into a slave by the treacherous Bald Man and eventually redeeming himself through acts of bravery. The plot introduces intricate symbolism, notably illustrated by the secondary characters. Among these are the helpful and sage old woman Holy Sunday, the tyrannical Red Emperor, and a band of five monstrous characters who provide the prince with serendipitous assistance. An influential work, "Harap Alb" received much attention from Creang's critical posterity, and became the inspiration for contributions in several fields. These include Ion Popescu-Gopo's film De-a fi Harap Alb, a Postmodernist novel by Stelian urlea and a comic book by Sandu Florea, alongside one of Gabriel Liiceanu's theses in the field of political philosophy. The title of the work and name of the protagonist originate with the antiquated Romanian word harap, which, like its more common version arap, originates with the "Arab" and covers the sense of "Black person" (or "Moor"), and alb, meaning "white." The notion of Harap Alb has therefore often been translated as "White Moor" or "White Arab." Both arap and harap are akin to a narrative theme present throughout the Balkans, from Turkey in the s...More: http: //booksllc.net/?id=23902144