A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories

Ten stories set in a Jim Crow South populated by grandmothers, drifters, salesmen and self-appointed prophets, most of whom are wrong about themselves in ways the reader sees long before they do. O’Connor’s method is consistent and merciless: an ordinary situation proceeds by ordinary logic until violence arrives and forces a moment of clarity on someone who has spent the whole story avoiding it. The title story is the most anthologised piece of American short fiction of its century, and the collection around it is just as unsparing.