Rituals to Observe: Stories about Holidays from the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction [Paperback]

ETHAN LAUGHMAN is among the few who have read every Flannery O’Connor Award–winning volume. He collaborated closely with the series’ authors in compiling these new anthologies. He currently teaches high school English.These stories amount to something more than a celebration of the holidays dotting our calendars from month to month. Even though holidays can occasion a return to the familiar, these stories challenge traditional associations. Each story serves to complicate how we observe the human observation of holidays and offers a nuanced understanding of related themes such as family and motherhood, travel, grief and mourning processes, and memory. More generally, holidays are days of observance, and that aspect alone offers a lot to unpack.