The Ballad of the Sad Café consists of six stories and a short novel with the same title as the book. I had never read Carson McCullers before; I can say that she reminded me why I should read more women authors.
The book begins with The Ballad of the Sad Café. This short, eighty-page novella will be enough for you to understand how influential an author McCullers is. Miss Amelia is going to be a character you won’t forget for a long time. In the following stories, you will read about both music and all the emotions that people cannot express. In each story, different sadnesses will come upon you, some will be familiar, some will stay with you more than necessary, but you will love them all one by one. If you love stories, read this book. And winter is the best season to read these stories. Enjoy!
The Ballad of the Sad Café
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.
Carson McCullers
Carson McCullers was an American novelist, short story writer, playwright, essayist, and poet. Her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, explores the spiritual isolation of misfits and outcasts in a small town of the Southern United States. Her other novels have similar themes and most are set in the deep South.
Reading this book contributed to these challenges:
