The Ballad of the Sad Cafe

Author(s): Carson McCullers

Adult Classics

'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 Caf 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 caf 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.


 


Also includes: Wunderkind; The Jockey; Madame Zilensky and the King of Finland; The Sojourner; A Domestic Dilemma; A Tree, A Rock, A Cloud


Product Information

Carson McCullers was born at Columbus, Georgia, in 1917. She published The Heart is a Lonely Hunter at the age of twenty-three. Her other works include Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941), The Member of the Wedding (1946), The Ballad of the Sad Cafe (1951), The Square Root of Wonderful (1958), a play, Clock Without Hands (1961), Sweet as a Pickle, Clean as a Pig (1964) and The Mortgaged Heart (published posthumously in 1972). She died in 1967.

General Fields

  • : 9780141183695
  • : Penguin UK
  • : Penguin
  • : 0.126
  • : June 2001
  • : 198mm X 129mm X 9mm
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : FA
  • : 160
  • : 812.54
  • : English
  • : 105
  • : Paperback
  • : Carson McCullers