Mystery # Manners is a selection of Flannery O'Connor's non-fiction writing. Opening with The King of the Birds', her famous account of raising peacocks at her home in Milledgeville, Georgia, this is an essential collection from one of America's finest prose stylists.'She is not just the best "woman writer" of this time and place: she expressed something secret about America called "the South", with that transcendent gift for expressing the real spirit of a culture that is conveyed by those writers who become nothing but what they see. She was a genius.' Alfred Kazin, New York Times Book Review'Flannery O'Connor leaves the reader appalled, moved and deeply impressed by a literary talent that has about it the uniqueness of greatness.' Sunday Telegraph'One of the most gifted and startling writers to have come out of the American South.' V. S. Pritchett
Includes three essays on regional writing, including "The Fiction Writer and His Country" and "Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction"; two pieces on teaching literature, including "Total Effect and the 8th Grade"; and four articles concerning the writer and religion, including "The Catholic Novel in the Protestant South."