
Everything That Rises Must Converge
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Narrated by:
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Bronson Pinchot
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Karen White
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Mark Bramhall
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Lorna Raver
About this listen
This collection of nine short stories by Flannery O'Connor was published posthumously in 1965. The flawed characters of each story are fully revealed in apocalyptic moments of conflict and violence that are presented with comic detachment.
The title story is a tragicomedy about social pride, racial bigotry, generational conflict, false liberalism, and filial dependence. The protagonist, Julian Chestny, is hypocritically disdainful of his mother's prejudices, but his smug selfishness is replaced with childish fear when she suffers a fatal stroke after being struck by a black woman she has insulted out of oblivious ignorance rather than malice.
Similarly, “The Comforts of Home” is about an intellectual son with an Oedipus complex. Driven by the voice of his dead father, the son accidentally kills his sentimental mother in an attempt to murder a harlot.
The other stories are “A View of the Woods”, “Parker's Back”, “The Enduring Chill”, “Greenleaf”, “The Lame Shall Enter First”, “Revelation”, and “Judgment Day”.
Flannery O'Connor was working on Everything That Rises Must Converge at the time of her death. This collection is an exquisite legacy from a genius of the American short story, in which she scrutinizes territory familiar to her readers: race, faith, and morality. The stories encompass the comic and the tragic, the beautiful and the grotesque; each carries her highly individual stamp and could have been written by no one else.
©1956 1957, 1958, 1960, 1961, 1962, 1964, 1965; renewed 1993 by the Estate of Mary Flannery O’Connor (P)2010 Blackstone Audio, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
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- By: Flannery O'Connor, Ben Alexander
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Critic reviews
Featured Article: The Best Short Story Audiobooks to Immerse Yourself In Now
Short stories have had a huge impact on the canon of great literature. In fact, some of history's most revered novelists—Ernest Hemingway, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Louisa May Alcott among them—wrote short stories, which make excellent introductions to their work. Plus, these bite-size listens are the perfect way to get a big dose of literary inspiration even when you’re short on time. To get you started, we’ve compiled a list of listens.
It would be bleak stuff if it weren't so enthralling, and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny. There's the story of a young man who bristles at his mother's unthinking racism, yet whose own enlightenment rings false. There's a self-righteous father who neglects his disappointing son in order to "save" a delinquent teenage boy, whose feral cunning more than matches him. There's a self-satisfied middle-aged woman who can't understand why she attracts the ire of a college girl in a doctor's waiting room -- after all, she's the "right sort of person", not like that poor white trash family a few seats over.
My favorite in the collection deals with the dark comedy that results when the mother of a bookish 30-something hermit who still lives at home takes pity on and naively decides to rescue a very troubled young woman, much to her son's annoyance. Since I sometimes loan books I've finished to my own mother, I had a laugh at the thought of sharing that one. Not that I live with my mom or she often brings home tragic 19-year-old girls with nymphomaniac tendencies (alas).
There are a few other reasons O'Connor remains a staple of writing classes. She's great with language, voice, and nuanced observations of human behavior, and at using foreshadowing and meaningful imagery. She works in major social issues (e.g. race) and religious themes (e.g. suffering, epiphany), but doesn't hit the reader over the head with them.
If you enjoy stories that are dark, unsparing, and grotesque, but also humorous, compassionate, and deeply honest, consider this collection. Reading up on O'Connor's life, which came to an early end from illness, it wasn't hard for me to see how some of her own personal trials must have informed her work. The brilliance of these stories still shines, and her influence is visible in later writers who have picked up on her methods (e.g. Jonathan Franzen, Claire Messud).
The audiobook production is pretty good. Some readers are better than others (one guy's voices sound like characters from South Park!), but I think you really need to have those thick southern accents in your head to fully appreciate the writing, so consider a listen.
Pride goeth before the fall
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A Painful Grace, A Search for the Holy
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Many stories same flavor
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I also have to say, it is hard to ingest the blatant racism in many of these stories. A tortured argument could be made that O'Connor is trying to "expose" the racism in America (particularly the South) and I am sure that what she depicts is accurate. But it doesn't take much digging through her personal letters to see the racism was an integral part of her life:
“About the Negroes, the kind I don’t like is the philosophizing, prophesying, pontificating kind, the James Baldwin kind. Very ignorant but never silent. Baldwin can tell us about what it feels to be a Negro in Harlam [sic] but he tries to tell us everything else too.”
Flannery O’Connor to Maryat Lee, May 21, 1964
It is a pity that someone who was such a brilliant observer of some aspects of the human condition could fail to see the humanity in others. I wish she had met Baldwin - he would have run rings around her. Making beautiful art for a filthy racist culture means that anything you make will always be stained.
Brilliant Stories, Great Narration, Racist
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Would you say that listening to this book was time well-spent? Why or why not?
yes. i enjoyed most of the listensWould you recommend Everything That Rises Must Converge to your friends? Why or why not?
maybe. if in converstionWhat aspect of the narrators’s performance would you have changed?
two narrators kept the interest and two did notWas Everything That Rises Must Converge worth the listening time?
yes. the stories were entertaining lessons. i felt bored by somemixed review
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One ripping good yarn after another
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What made the experience of listening to Everything That Rises Must Converge the most enjoyable?
Listening to a Flannery O'Connor story is as enjoyable as reading one.Who was your favorite character and why?
The Mother. She was strong-willed in her determination, even if her view of society was wrong and outdated.Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?
When the mother had her stroke, totally unpredictable and shocking.Must Have!
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Well done
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Flannery O'Connor was a devout Christian, and her stories reflect her faith in one way or another, in some stories it is more blatant than in others, but all the stories are wonderful for their grotesque characters struggling through everyday life. Most of them deal with the social upheaval in the Mid Twentieth Century South. And with that backdrop she begins in Southern Goth style to lampoon popular notions of Christianity, the notions held by many Christians themselves, but then she also effectively lampoons positions that are seen as intellectually superior to Christianity too. Really quite a masterful work of fiction.
Bringing Life to the Grotesque in Southern Goth
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The readings were well done, on the whole.
Grim stories, not for the faint of heart!
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