In any list of the best short stories ever written, you have to include something by Flannery O’Connor. It’s an actual crime not to – and with good reason. She was a flat out, one of a kind genius. O’Connor is someone else I first read in the Granta anthology and it’s that story, ‘Good Country People’, that I want to include here. It tells the story of Mrs Hopewell and her daughter, Hulga, a morose 32 year old with ‘a number of degrees’ and a wooden leg who has changed her name from Joy specifically to spite her mother. When a bible salesman visits, Hulga is fascinated by the possibility of seducing him and he by the thought of her leg. Usually, when I admire a writer, it makes me want to write like them, but not in O’Connor’s case. You know that you could never write something so strange, so savage and so funny – and you shouldn’t even try.
First published in A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories (1955, Harcourt, Brace and Company) and widely collected and anthologised.
A Personal Anthology 