'Flannery O'Connor is my favourite American short story writer. These are proudly elegant stories of human stupidity, white privileges, rich with humour and what ails the human heart ' Claire Keegan

The American South. A turbulent world, fraught with the Civil Rights struggle and toxic religious tensions. Against the backdrop of mountainous sunsets and backwater shacks, deserted highways and small-town gas stations, people forge their own lives.

We encounter murderers, escaped convicts, dysfunctional families, conmen, fanatics, farmhands, Bible salesmen, troubled children, gangsters, hypocrites, misfits and outcasts. These are characters marked by grotesque flaws, darkly humorous and oddly beautiful. Their complex humanity is revealed in apocalyptic moments of Gothic horror, absurdity and violence that transform all who witness them - and us, too, as we realise that nothing in our moral universe is black and white.

Selected and introduced by Lauren Groff, these stories from Flannery O'Connor show her to be the supreme tragicomic chronicler of these bodies and souls, her classic stories infused with the dazzling force of prophecy as one of the century's most visionary writers.