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Wise Blood

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Wise Blood

By: Flannery O’Connor
Narrated by: Bronson Pinchot
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About this listen

Flannery O’Connor’s astonishing and haunting first novel is a classic of 20th-century literature. It is the story of Hazel Motes, a 22-year-old caught in an unending struggle against his innate, desperate faith. He falls under the spell of a “blind” street preacher named Asa Hawks and his degenerate 15-year-old daughter.

In an ironic, malicious gesture of his own non-faith, and to prove himself a greater cynic than Hawks, Hazel founds The Church of God Without Christ but is still thwarted in his efforts to lose God. He meets Enoch Emery, a young man with “wise blood,” who leads him to a mummified holy child and whose crazy maneuvers are a manifestation of Hazel’s existential struggles.

This tale of redemption, retribution, false prophets, blindness, and wisdom gives us one of the most riveting characters in American fiction.

©1990 The Estate of Mary Flannery O’Connor (P)2010 Blackstone Audio Classics Literary Fiction Southern States United States Fiction Witty

Critic Reviews

“No other major American writer of our century has constructed a fictional world so energetically and forthrightly charged by religious investigation.” ( The New Yorker)
“There is in Flannery O’Connor a fierceness of literary gesture, an angriness of observation, a facility for catching, as an animal eye in the wilderness, cunningly and at one sharp glance, the shape and detail and animal intention of enemy and foe.” ( The New York Times Book Review)

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Profile Image for Robert Hiini

Outstanding reading

I liked this book very much. It will need some mulling over. The read is magnificent. Worth it to hear the narrator utter Maud's lines alone.

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Excellent in every way

A great introduction to her work, brilliantly performed in an ideal medium for her stories.

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Damn

Excellent characterisation! Love the way Flannery writes. If you like the strange characters then this one is for you

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