At times we may think that we know the truth about our desires, identity, or character—only to discover that we were blind and mistaken. Frequently, such self-knowledge requires a crisis, a turning point, or an outside intervention without which one could only live within a false conception of our lives and their place in the world. Can we distinguish between our true identity and our false conceptions? How do we come to know ourselves? This summer, join Morningside as we explore these topics in the short stories of Leo Tolstoy and Flannery O’Connor.

Leo Tolstoy is acclaimed as the greatest novelist of all time, but his short stories are just as remarkable, detailed, and introspective as War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Flannery O’Connor is today remembered as one of the great American writers, and her work continues to be taken seriously both as American literature and as exemplary of the short story genre.