My reading of the third story in Flannery O’Connor’s 1947 thesis collection prompts me to make the following observations:

(1) This is perhaps the weakest story in O’Connor’s thesis collection.

(2) Blind Gabriel, both as young boy and as old man in the story, with his thinly disguised fear of the wildcat, gives readers something to think about—especially in terms of his claim of a primal awareness of matters beyond normal sensibility, and in terms of his thin veneer of courage that barely covers a not-so-insensible fear of something out there (ostensibly the wildcat)—but Gabriel’s story is encumbered by the author’s attempts at dialect (not very well managed) and the characters’ dialogue and diction (also not well managed).

(3) Again, with apologies to O’Connor, the influences of William Faulkner and Erskine Cauldwell are everywhere evident in the derivative and awkward (but mercifully short) “Wildcat.”

(4) If I had been her thesis advisor (which is a fanciful time-travel imagining that is presumptuous on a variety of levels), I would say, “Ms.

Natural health expert and author Jordan Rubin has recovered $55,000 from Strang Communications in a dispute that revealed the faith-based publisher improperly withheld royalties payments for three years from the paperback edition of his New York Times bestseller The Maker’s Diet. Rubin said he was forced to file an arbitration claim after numerous requests and attempts to settle the matter were ignored.

“I wanted to believe this was an honest mistake,” said Rubin.

After I made several earlier attempts in past years (false-starts) to read J. F. Powers’ MORTE D’URBAN (when, for reasons not related to the quality of the book, I had to set it aside without finishing it), I am now well on my way into reading and finishing what I am beginning to regard as one of the most intriguing and important novels of the 20th century.