Robert Fitzgerald (1) (1971–)

As someone who is coming to the topic from a perspective of historical interest, not the perspective of an interior designer, I wish that this book had had more references about the source of the images and objects. (E.g., the book will have a beautiful image of an art nouveau door, but not tell you where it is located or who the designer is, making it difficult to do any follow up research on the building.)

Still, it's a reasonably good introduction to the topic and I did learn some things.… (altro)

A reading friend encouraged me to continue reading O'Connor after I expressed the miserable experience with [Wise Blood], and I'm glad he did. [A Good man is Hard to Find] deserves to be in the canon of best short fiction ever written. These essays, posthumously collected, deserve the same treatment in the canon of writing about writing. This may be one of the best books I've ever read on the writing process, the aspects of fiction, and the value of storytelling. You can find many of the pieces in the collected works of O'Connor, but they serve as a nice self-contained collection all on their own. O'Connor may have thought on her place in literature, and her work's connection to faith and spirituality, more than any other author I've come across. Her sense of place, as a Southern writer or religiously-influenced writer, is really a broader comment on her own practice of faith more than anything else. These works should be mandatory reading in any Master of Fine Arts Creative Writing program - we'd see an elevation of the work if they were.

5 bones!!!!!
Highly recommended… (altro)

This is a great collection of, as the subtitle states clearly, the occasional essays penned by O'Connor. While no theme ties the material together, it yet offers a genuine insight into her thinking on matters as idiosyncratic as raising peacocks, and as steeped and penetrating as her views on writing short stories. If you're already a fan of her work - and I am - then you'll be delighted with this text. It almost feels like the kind of conversation one might have had with her in a coffee shop or at the front of a room after a conference presentation, and yet her writing contains the kind of edge and humour that can only come from craft.… (altro)