The Ballad of the Sad Cafe and other Stories - Softcover

McCullers, Carson

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0141183691 ISBN 13: 9780141183695

Publisher: Penguin Classic, 2000

Synopsis

'Brilliant ... a panorama of a remarkable talent ... McCullers's finest stories' The New York Times Few writers have expressed loneliness, the need for human understanding and the search for love with such power and poetic sensibility as the American writer Carson McCullers, and The Ballad of the Sad Café collects her best-loved novella together with six short stories, published in Penguin Modern Classics. Miss Amelia Evans, tall, strong and nobody's fool, runs a small-town store. Except for a disastrous marriage that lasted just ten days, she has always lived alone. Then Cousin Lymon appears from nowhere, a strutting hunchback who steals Miss Amelia's heart. Together they transform the store into a lively, popular café where the locals come to drink and gossip. But when her rejected and dangerous ex-husband Marvin Macy returns, the result is a bizarre love triangle that brings with it violence, hatred and betrayal. Among other fine works, the collection also includes 'Wunderkind', McCullers's first published story written when she was only seventeen, about a musical prodigy who suddenly realizes she will not go on to become a great pianist.

About this title

About the Author:

Carson McCullers was born in 1917. She is the critically acclaimed author of several popular novels in the 1940s and '50s, including The Member of the Wedding (1946). Her novels frequently depicted life in small towns of the southeastern United States and were marked by themes of loneliness and spiritual isolation. McCullers suffered from ill health most of her adult life, including a series of strokes that began when she was in her 20s; she died at the age of 50. The Member of the Wedding was dramatized for the stage in the 1950s and filmed in 1952 and 1997. Other films based on her books are Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967, with Elizabeth Taylor and Marlon Brando), The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1968, starring Alan Arkin) and The Ballad of the Sad Café (1991).

Review:

Brilliant ... a panorama of a remarkable talent ... McCullers's finest stories * The New York Times * Unexpectedly moving, grimly amusing, intensely atmospheric * The Times * The greatest prose writer that the South produced ... She has examined the heart of man with an understanding that no other writer can hope to surpass -- Tennessee Williams Of all the Southern writers, she is the most apt to endure -- Gore Vidal

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Classic
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0141183691
• ISBN 13: 9780141183695
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 160