On days I don't know what kind of mood I'm in I turn to Flannery O'Connor. Her stories never disappoint me. She so expertly places you inside the heads of her characters and in the fields and farms and dusty backwoods roads they inhabit, that once the story ends you have a distinct memory of being there that transcends most storytelling. The vision she presents can be a little bleak sometimes - sketching a portrait of humanity as cynical, petty or stubborn in their ignorance - but it's usually leavened with large doses of humour. How she creates empathy in so few syllables is a magic trick of an accomplished artist. She makes it so easy that you don't see the effort exerted and the skill involved, so that you focus on the suspenseful events on the surface of the story - aware only subliminally if at all - of what's going underneath her characters. And us all.