(not final cover)
News has broken over the last few days via The Guardian and now The A.V. Club about our impending publication of Flannery O'Connor: The Cartoons, collecting the author's seldom-seen visual work from her student days. The Guardian's Peter Wild writes:
"Cut from linoleum with oil-based ink applied to the ridges, the drawings are rudimentary but charming, a stripped down version of what Marjane Satrapi did in Persepolis. What's clear, though, is the perspective of the outsider, which O'Connor refined in her debut novel Wise Blood and stories such as 'A Good Man is Hard to Find.' … Even though the cartoons are largely comic, and lack the richness of detail that a short story affords, it would be wrong to dismiss them as juvenilia…. The darkness she would make her own is already showing its teeth…. 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."
The A.V. Club's Nathan Rabin says:
"O’Connor’s funny drawings are distinguished both by the author’s morbid sense of humor and surprisingly sharp and memorable visual sense. Nearly a half-century after her death, O’Connor continues to surprise."
See our page for the book for more information.