New essay in PEN America

An essay I wrote about Flannery O'Connor is in the new issue of PEN America.

The first line:

There’s a great moment in her 1964 story “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” where Flannery O’Connor writes of a snobby wannabe writer’s complicated feelings toward his ancestral Southern home: “He never spoke of it without contempt or thought of it without longing.”

She said she wouldn't marry a man who just brought her a watermelon on Saturday.

Audio of Flannery O'Connor, in 1959, reading "A Good Man Is Hard to Find."

i bought some sweet old books

i'm a big fan of old books and their covers. there are a lot of things to like about old editions--their uniqueness, their often beautiful and surprising covers, their generally lower price (though of course there are exceptions). here are a few of my favorites i've gotten recently:

The Violent Bear It Away by Flannery O'Connor (FSG, Eleventh Printing, 1979)

$6, New York, NY

Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov (Avon, 1957)

$18, New York, NY

The Trial by Franz Kafka (The Modern Library, First Printing, 1975)

$5, Brooklyn, NY

  Pan by Knut Hamsun (Noonday, Tenth Printing, 1968)

$1.50, Lawrence, KS 

The Waves by Virginia Woolf (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1959)

$5, Peterborough, NH

Woodcutters by Thomas Bernhard (Knopf, First Printing, 1987)

A gift, Brooklyn, NY

The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea by Yukio Mishima (Tuttle, Fifth Printing, 1972)

$2, Lawrence, KS

A Year from Monday: New Lectures and Writings by John Cage

(Wesleyan University Press, Second Printing, July 1970)

$15, New York, NY

The Box Man by Kobo Abe (Knopf, First Printing, 1974)

$6, Brooklyn, NY

The Book of Sand by Jorge Luis Borges (Dutton, First Printing, 1978)

$5, Peterborough, NH


 Dubliners by James Joyce (Viking/Compass, Twelfth Printing, October 1973)
$2, Lawrence, KS

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (Scribner, 1970)
$.50, Anderson, SC