A Circle in the Fire and Other Stories

This collection of short stories is set among farms, small towns, and roadside places in the mid-twentieth-century American South. The title story follows Mrs Cope, a property-proud widow, as three teenage boys from the city arrive at her farm, refuse her terms, and push the visit toward destruction. Companion stories likewise place self-assured landowners, travelling salesmen, displaced tenants, and religious obsessives in situations where manners, race, and doctrine fail to hold. O'Connor's fiction is comic and violent at once: characters defend their respectability or their private gospels until an intrusion-human, accidental, or theological-forces a reckoning they did not invite.

Bound in cream cloth, cover blocked with a black and orange design by Deanna Staffo. Orange/brown slipcase.