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The Ballad of the Sad Cafe and Other Stories

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SKU:
104
Condition:
Very Good
Format:
Paperback, 693 pages
Publisher:
Quality Paperback Book Club, 1991

When The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter was published in 1940, Carson McCullers was instantly recognized as one of the most promising writers of her generation. The novels that followed established her as a master of Southern Gothic.  "McCullers' gift," writes Joyce Carol Oates, "was to evoke, through an accumulation of images and musically repeated phrases, the singularity of experience, not to pass judgment on it." McCullers effortlessly conveyed the raw anguish of her characters and the weird beauty of their perceptions. Set in small Georgia towns that are at once precisely observed and mythically resonant, McCullers' novels explore the strange, sometimes grotesque inner lives of characters who are often marginal and misunderstood. Above all, McCullers possessed an unmatched ability to capture the bewilderment and fragile wonder of adolescence. 

In The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, an enigmatic deaf-mute draws out the haunted confessions of an itinerant worker, a young girl, a black doctor, and the widowed owner of a small-town café. The Ballad of the Sad Café (1943), uses melodramatic scenarios and freakish characters to explore the disfiguring violence of desire. The Member of the Wedding (1946), on which the play and film were based, tells of a young girl's fascination with her brother's wedding and is perhaps McCullers' most moving and accomplished novel. 

About the Author

Carson McCullers was born in Columbus, Georgia, in 1917.  Educated at Columbia University and New York University, she published her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, at the age of 22 to great critical and popular success.  The Member of the Wedding appeared in 1946.  In 1950, McCullers adapted it as a play, which won the New York Critics Award.  It was filmed in 1952.  The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, a novella, was published in 1951. It was dramatized by Edward Albee in 1963, and a film released in 1991 was based on it.  Carson McCullers died in 1967.