Flannery O'Connor said she was intimidated by William Faulkner, a Southern contemporary, but I honestly think if she hadn't been dying of lupus in the process of writing, this book could have been one of the all-time greats. She's better than Chekhov. She's better than Hemingway's god damn baby shoes schtick. Her short stories are better than any of the stories Faulkner tried to write, and I've read most of them. However, if you've read her earlier, much more famous stuff then you might just label her a God-tooting moralist—“Wow, a good man really is hard to find!” But here, you come out of these stories feeling mostly confused: (1) Why would the guy who got a huge tattoo of Jesus Christ on his back end up crying against a tree? (2) Why would someone who's merely trying to behave as virtuously as she possibly could, only going by what she's been taught through sheer circumstance, still get ruthlessly punished by God? (3) Why would an author who uses the n-word liberally end another story by depicting a woman who hallucinates a bunch of n-words entering heaven before she did? It's a cycle of nine stories that illustrates the title, that each of us, race-gender-class-location-citycountrywhathaveyou, will have to meet and confront each other if we both intend to climb any further than we already have, and that (except for one story) doesn't necessarily portray faith as something that elevates: Jesus-loving woman believes she's saved by following Sunday school theology to a tee for all her life, but hates LITERALLY every other human being alive = Jesus-mocking tattooed man somehow finding the lure of God literally inescapable = seemingly kind woman finds stray bull teasing her herd, tries to raise children: fails, tries to run farm: fails, tries to steamroll over other people: fails, tries to be a strong woman: fails, yet when she gets gored by that stray bull you're kind of glad it happened to her. Flannery O'Connor makes it look easy. But what she tried to achieve with her stories was really hard, and must have taken an inordinate amount of thought. And a lot of mystery. And they almost get to "classic level," they really almost get there. What is it that I think that stops them? There are a few times throughout the book where your view doesn't feel expansive, but instead feels restrictive and plain—in other words “bad simple.” As if she was too tired to think about it all. Considering how successfully the rest of the book hides enormous complexities within simple-seeming frames, this feels like a sin. Four stars.