Everything That Rises Must Converge — Flannery O'Connor (1965)

Flannery O'Connor's posthumous collection — published just after her death from lupus at 39 — contains the densest concentration of her Catholic grotesque: stories of the American South in which violence and grace arrive simultaneously, and spiritual revelation comes through shock, humiliation, or death. Her theological seriousness combined with her pitch-black comedy makes her the most distinctive American voice in 20th-century short fiction.