A Good Man Is Hard to Find

A GOOD MAN IS HARD TO FIND features some of Flannery O'Connor's best short stories. Often associated with the term Southern gothic, O'Connor, a consummate master of the short story form, condenses character and meaning into gems of distinctive language. Narrator Marguerite Gavin flawlessly reproduces the dialogue of O'Connor's American grotesques, among them a less-than-pious traveling Bible salesman, a young boy and his grandfather on an outing to Atlanta, a 104-year-old Civil War veteran, and a hard-edged farm woman jealous of a new immigrant and his family. Gavin gives each of these characters an authentic voice, not only by reproducing their speech accurately but also by conveying the complexity of seemingly straightforward characters caught in the tangled web of their own motivations. L.X. (c) AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine