Georgia has produced some of the major figures of modern literature, including Carson McCullers, Erskine Caldwell and, most notably, Flannery O'Connor. While such writers are firmly established in American literary history, all too few readers are aware of how the state's tradition of literary excellence persists in the present day. The thirty stories in After O'Connor were written during the past fifteen years by authors who were born in Georgia or spent a significant part of their lives and careers in this state. Embracing the social, cultural, and ethnic variety in today's Georgia, After O'Connor both advances and helps redefine the great southern storytelling tradition.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The intimate, inspiring, and authoritative biography of Sandra Day O’Connor, America’s first female Supreme Court justice, drawing on exclusive interviews and first-time access to Justice O’Connor’s archives—as seen on PBS’s American Experience “She’s a hero for our time, and this is the biography for our time.”—Walter Isaacson Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize • Named One of the Best Books of the Year by NPR and The Washington Post She was born in 1930 in El Paso and grew up on a cattle ranch in Arizona. At a time when women were expected to be homemakers, she set her sights on Stanford University. When she graduated near the top of her law school class in 1952, no firm would even interview her. But Sandra Day O’Connor’s story is that of a woman who repeatedly shattered glass ceilings—doing so with a blend of grace, wisdom, humor, understatement, and cowgirl toughness. She became the first ever female majority leader of a state senate. As a judge on the Arizona Court of Appeals, she stood up to corrupt lawyers and humanized the law. When she arrived at the United States Supreme Court, appointed by President Ronald Reagan in 1981, she began a quarter-century tenure on the Court, hearing cases that ultimately shaped American law. Diagnosed with cancer at fifty-eight, and caring for a husband with Alzheimer’s, O’Connor endured every difficulty with grit and poise. Women and men who want to be leaders and be first in their own lives—who want to learn when to walk away and when to stand their ground—will be inspired by O’Connor’s example. This is a remarkably vivid and personal portrait of a woman who loved her family, who believed in serving her country, and who, when she became the most powerful woman in America, built a bridge forward for all women. Praise for First “Cinematic . . . poignant . . . illuminating and eminently readable . . . First gives us a real sense of Sandra Day O’Connor the human being. . . . Thomas gives O’Connor the credit she deserves.”—The Washington Post “[A] fascinating and revelatory biography . . . a richly detailed picture of [O’Connor’s] personal and professional life . . . Evan Thomas’s book is not just a biography of a remarkable woman, but an elegy for a worldview that, in law as well as politics, has disappeared from the nation’s main stages.”—The New York Times Book Review

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Thirty one short stories that offer a picture of the Deep South.

During the 1950s and early 1960s Flannery O'Connor wrote more than a hundred book reviews for two Catholic diocesan newspapers in Georgia. This full collection of these reviews nearly doubles the number that have appeared in print elsewhere and represents a significant body of primary materials from the O'Connor canon. We find in the reviews the same personality so vividly apparent in her fiction and her lectures--the unique voice of the artist that is one clear sign of genius. Her spare precision, her humor, her extraordinary ability to permit readers to see deeply into complex and obscure truths-all are present in these reviews and letters.

I love a sunburnt dystopia. Straya lies in ruins. A once proud nation, former Australia has regressed into a patchwork civilization cowering under the deadly heat of a merciless sun. Savage violence lurks around every corner. Good pubs, but. Affable young mutant, Franga, risks life and double-jointed limb to help provide for his makeshift family of mutie kids and increasingly senile friend and mentor, Ken Ages. After finding a strange artifact in the deadly Downlow district, Franga inadvertently starts a horrifying chain reaction... Something terrifying takes form in New Sydney. A colossal beast rises, as unspeakably powerful as it is malevolent, and if Franga and his crew of misfits can't stop it? Then all of Straya is completely farked. Screenwriter and journalist Anthony O'Connor's debut novel balances canny social allegory with subversive wit and an oddly optimistic sense of hope.

From the acclaimed, controversial singer-songwriter Sinéad O'Connor comes a revelatory memoir of her fraught childhood, musical triumphs, fearless activism, and of the enduring power of song. Blessed with a singular voice and a fiery temperament, Sinéad O'Connor rose to massive fame in the late 1980s and 1990s with a string of gold records. By the time she was twenty, she was world famous--living a rock star life out loud. From her trademark shaved head to her 1992 appearance on Saturday Night Live when she tore up Pope John Paul II's photograph, Sinéad has fascinated and outraged millions. In Rememberings, O'Connor recounts her painful tale of growing up in Dublin in a dysfunctional, abusive household. Inspired by a brother's Bob Dylan records, she escaped into music. She relates her early forays with local Irish bands; we see Sinéad completing her first album while eight months pregnant, hanging with Rastas in the East Village, and soaring to unimaginable popularity with her cover of Prince's "Nothing Compares 2U." Intimate, replete with candid anecdotes and told in a singular form true to her unconventional career, Sinéad's memoir is a remarkable chronicle of an enduring and influential artist.

At once far flung and intimate, a fascinating look at how finding our way make us human. "A marvel of storytelling." —Kirkus (Starred Review) In this compelling narrative, O'Connor seeks out neuroscientists, anthropologists and master navigators to understand how navigation ultimately gave us our humanity. Biologists have been trying to solve the mystery of how organisms have the ability to migrate and orient with such precision—especially since our own adventurous ancestors spread across the world without maps or instruments. O'Connor goes to the Arctic, the Australian bush and the South Pacific to talk to masters of their environment who seek to preserve their traditions at a time when anyone can use a GPS to navigate. O’Connor explores the neurological basis of spatial orientation within the hippocampus. Without it, people inhabit a dream state, becoming amnesiacs incapable of finding their way, recalling the past, or imagining the future. Studies have shown that the more we exercise our cognitive mapping skills, the greater the grey matter and health of our hippocampus. O'Connor talks to scientists studying how atrophy in the hippocampus is associated with afflictions such as impaired memory, dementia, Alzheimer’s Disease, depression and PTSD. Wayfinding is a captivating book that charts how our species' profound capacity for exploration, memory and storytelling results in topophilia, the love of place. "O'Connor talked to just the right people in just the right places, and her narrative is a marvel of storytelling on its own merits, erudite but lightly worn. There are many reasons why people should make efforts to improve their geographical literacy, and O'Connor hits on many in this excellent book—devouring it makes for a good start." —Kirkus Reviews

“I intend to stand firm and let the peacocks multiply, for I am sure that, in the end, the last word will be theirs.” —Flannery O’Connor When she was young, the writer Flannery O’Connor was captivated by the chickens in her yard. She’d watch their wings flap, their beaks peck, and their eyes glint. At age six, her life was forever changed when she and a chicken she had been training to walk forwards and backwards were featured in the Pathé News, and she realized that people want to see what is odd and strange in life. But while she loved birds of all varieties and kept several species around the house, it was the peacocks that came to dominate her life. Written by Amy Alznauer with devotional attention to all things odd and illustrated in radiant paint by Ping Zhu, The Strange Birds of Flannery O’Connor explores the beginnings of one author’s lifelong obsession. Amy Alznauer lives in Chicago with her husband, two children, a dog, a parakeet, sometimes chicks, and a part-time fish, but, as of today, no elephants or peacocks. Ping Zhu is a freelance illustrator who has worked with clients big and small, won some awards based on the work she did for aforementioned clients, attracted new clients with shiny awards, and is hoping to maintain her livelihood in Brooklyn by repeating that cycle.

Flannery O'Connor is considered one of America's greatest fiction writers. The immensely talented Robert Giroux, editor-in-chief of Harcourt, Brace & Company and later of Farrar, Straus; Giroux, was her devoted friend and admirer. He edited her three books published during her lifetime, plus Everything that Rises Must Converge, which she completed just before she died in 1964 at the age of thirty-nine, the posthumous The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor, and the subsequent award-winning collection of her letters titled The Habit of Being. When poet Robert Lowell first introduced O'Connor to Giroux in March 1949, she could not have imagined the impact that meeting would have on her life or on the landscape of postwar American literature. Flannery O'Connor and Robert Giroux: A Publishing Partnership sheds new light on an area of Flannery O’Connor’s life—her relationship with her editors—that has not been well documented or narrated by critics and biographers. Impressively researched and rich in biographical details, this book chronicles Giroux’s and O’Connor’s personal and professional relationship, not omitting their circle of friends and fellow writers, including Robert Lowell, Caroline Gordon, Sally and Robert Fitzgerald, Allen Tate, Thomas Merton, and Robert Penn Warren. As Patrick Samway explains, Giroux guided O'Connor to become an internationally acclaimed writer of fiction and nonfiction, especially during the years when she suffered from lupus at her home in Milledgeville, Georgia, a disease that eventually proved fatal. Excerpts from their correspondence, some of which are published here for the first time, reveal how much of Giroux's work as editor was accomplished through his letters to Milledgeville. They are gracious, discerning, and appreciative, just when they needed to be. In Father Samway's portrait of O'Connor as an extraordinarily dedicated writer and businesswoman, she emerges as savvy, pragmatic, focused, and determined. This engrossing account of O'Connor's publishing history will interest, in addition to O'Connor's fans, all readers and students of American literature.