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Originally Posted by Bookpossum
I enjoyed "First Confession" so much that I read it to my husband this morning as we had our coffee after breakfast.
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I got to that too, very funny, and it did bring back memories of my own first confession :-)
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Originally Posted by issybird
I was interested to see that O'Connor drastically revamped "First Confession" twice; the first time to concentrate the action, the second time to put it in the first person.
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issybird, did you find any of the third person versions?
As for O'Connor's collections of short stories, according to the "Notes on selection" in the edition I am using, compiled by Julian Barnes:
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O’Connor published six volumes of stories in his lifetime: Guests of the Nation (1931), Bones of Contention (1936), Crab Apple Jelly (1944), The Common Chord (1947), Traveller’s Samples (1951) and Domestic Relations (1957). He also chose The Stories of Frank O’Connor (1952), followed by More Stories (1954), which he later reworked as Collection Two (1964). After his death his widow, Harriet O’Donovan Sheehy, published Collection Three (1969) and The Cornet-Player Who Betrayed Ireland (1981). I have chosen thirty stories from the hundred and fifty or so these books contain. O’Connor was very attentive to the ordering of his stories within each volume; I have followed his lead, preferring a kind of overall narrative to the hazards of chronological order. So the book begins with stories about childhood; then war; then peace and adulthood; then age and death. This is not, however, intended to make the contents seem more autobiographical than they are. O’Connor’s letters to and from William Maxwell were published as The Happiness of Getting It Down Right, edited by Michael Steinman (Alfred A. Knopf, 1996)
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Quote:
Originally Posted by issybird
O'Connor: "I would wish you to believe that if you work hard at a story over a period of twenty-five or thirty years, there is a reasonable chance that at last you will get it right."
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seems to have inspired the title of the correspondence with William Maxwell!