“Flannery O’Connor: The Cartoons”

Flannery O’Connor is one of my favorite authors with “The Violent Bear It Away” as one of the best novels I have read. So whenever I see anything pop up about her, I race right to it to see what’s what. This one from Flavorwire is particularly delicious:

Posthumous releases, particularly for universally exalted authors, are not rare. But collections of their work in other forms is more unusual, so we have to admit that we’re pretty excited for Flannery O’Connor: The Cartoons, which will be released by Fantagraphics in December of this year. The book compiles all of the existing cartoons that O’Connor created for her high school and college publications in the 1940?s, when she was an avid cartoonist as well as a writer. Her style is distinctive — the charmingly brusque drawings are cut from linoleum and then essentially stamped when she applied ink to the ridges, and while the content is largely related to her experience as a student, you can still feel the slightly skewed, individualistic perspective that appears in O’Connor’s short stories.

“Do you have any books the faculty doesn’t particularly recommend?”

“Wake me up in time to clap.”

For more of O’Connor’s cartoons, go here.

The Guardian has this review of the book:

Later in life, Flannery O’Connor — the “pigeon-toed only child with a receding chin and a you-leave-me-alone-or-I’ll-bite-you complex” — turned to painting, the house she shared with her mother adorned with portraits of herself and her peacocks. The cartoons, then, remain a glimpse of what might have been. And for fans, this is that all-too-rare commodity: a “new” Flannery O’Connor book to slip on the shelf besides the scant few books she left us with.

For more on the tragically short but brilliant creative life of Flannery O’Connor, go here to the Flannery O’Connor — Andalusia Foundation website.

Anyone else an O’Connor fan?

Comment Archive