Books: Such Nice People

A GOOD MAN is HARD TO FIND, AND OTHER STORIES (251 pp.)—Flannery O'Connor—Harcourt, Brace ($3.50).

These ten witheringly sarcastic stories come from another talented Southern lady whose work is highly unladylike. Still in her late twenties, and the product of a college writing class (State University of Iowa), Georgia's Flannery O'Connor has already learned to strip the acres of clay-country individuality with the merciless efficiency of a cotton-picking machine. She can also slash through the window boxes and buckthorn hedges and expose the peckernecks who have moved to town and put on pretensions. Her instruments are a brutal irony, a...