Happy Birthday, Flannery!

She wrote two novels and thirty-two short stories, as well as a number of reviews and commentaries.

She was a Southern writer who often wrote in a sardonic Southern Gothic style, relying heavily on regional settings and grotesque characters, often in violent situations. The unsentimental acceptance or rejection of the limitations, imperfections, or differences of these characters (whether attributed to disability, race, crime, religion, or sanity) typically underpins the drama.

I met Flannery in my freshman lit class, and she freaked me out. She also gave me my go-to phrase when I'm flummoxed. "A good man is hard to find." (Or as we liked to say after a few beers, A hard man is good to find.)

If you haven't read her collected short stories, read them and prepare to have your head rearranged. Then, if you're still standing, go for the novels.