Carson McCullers

The beloved classic that turned Carson McCullers into an overnight literary sensation and one of the Modern Library's top 20 novels of the 20th century.“A remarkable book...From the opening page, brilliant in its establishment of mood, character, and suspense, the book takes hold of the reader.”In a Georgia Mill town during the 1930s, an enigmatic John Singer, draws out the haunted confessions of an itinerant worker, a doctor, a widowed café owner, and a young girl. Each yearns for escape from small town life, but the young girl, Mick Kelly, the book's heroine (loosely based on McCullers), finds solace in her music.Wonderfully attuned to the spiritual isolation that underlies the human condition, and with a deft sense for racial tensions in the South, McCullers spins a haunting, unforgettable story that gives voice to the rejected, the forgotten, and the mistreated—and, through Mick, gives voice to the quiet, intensely personal search for beauty.

Introducing Little Clothbound Classics: irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith.Celebrating the range and diversity of Penguin Classics, they take us from snowy Japan to springtime Vienna, from haunted New England to a sun-drenched Mediterranean island, and from a game of chess on the ocean to a love story on the moon. Beautifully designed and printed, these collectible editions are bound in colourful, tactile cloth and stamped with foil.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. The Ballad of the Sad Café is her masterpiece: an unruly, bittersweet novella concerning the most unlikely of love triangles.'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

From the master of Southern Gothic, Carson McCullers's coming-of-age story like no other about a young girl's fascination with her brother's wedding.Twelve-year-old Frankie is utterly, hopelessly bored with life until she hears about her older brother's wedding. Bolstered by lively conversations with her family maid, Berenice, and her six-year-old cousin -- not to mention her own unbridled imagination -- Frankie takes on an overly active role in the wedding, hoping even to go, uninvited, on the honeymoon, so deep is her desire to be a member of something larger, more accepting than herself.

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. This Library of America volume collects McCullers's complete novels for the first time in a single-volume edition that reveals the power and breadth of her haunting vision. "McCullers's 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's 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 (1940), one of the most extraordinary debuts in modern American literature, an enigmatic deaf-mute draws out the haunted confessions of an itinerant worker, a young girl, a doctor, and a widowed owner of a small-town caf . The disfiguring violence of desire is explored with shocking intensity in two shorter works, Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941) and The Ballad of the Sad Caf (1943). The Member of the Wedding (1946), thought by many to be McCullers's masterpiece, hauntingly depicts a young girl's fascination with her brother's wedding. In 13-year-old Frankie Addams, confused, easily wounded, yet determined to survive, McCullers created her most indelible protagonist. Clock Without Hands (1960), her final novel, was completed against great odds in the midst of tremendous physical suffering. Set against the background of court-ordered school integration, it contains some of McCullers's most forceful social criticism. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

'Rarely has emotional turbulence been so delicately conveyed' The New York TimesWith delicacy of perception and memory, humour and pathos, Carson McCullers spreads before us the three phases of a weekend crisis in the life of a motherless twelve-year-old girl. Within the span of a few hours, the irresistible, hoydenish Frankie passionately plays out her fantasies at her elder brother's wedding. Through a perilous skylight we look into the mind of a child torn between her yearning to belong and the urge to run away.

'Impeccable ... The most impressive of her novels' Atlantic MonthlyIn this thoughtful and moving novel, four men find themselves inextricably bound together by their past histories. The aged Judge Clane dreams of resurrecting the confederacy, while his grandson, Jester, is involuntarily drawn to Sherman, a volatile black orphan who feels the sharp sting of racial injustice, especially when he finds out the truth about his parentage. Through the eyes of these individuals Carson McCullers explores the roots of racial prejudice and the dual moralities of the town's leading whites.

90 Classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin BooksOn a military base in 1930s Georgia, Private Ellgee Williams catches sight of his captain’s wife in the nude and becomes obsessed with her. But Captain Penderton – unhappily married to the unfaithful Leonora – in turn erotically fixates on Williams. Spare, muscular and sensual, with the dramatic vision of a Greek myth, Carson McCullers’ novella is a timeless work about the alienation of forbidden desire.

His hand sought the adjacent flesh and sorrow paralleled desire in the immense complexity of love.These moving stories by one of the great masters of Southern gothic portray love, sorrow and our search for happiness and understanding. Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.

Celebrated worldwide for her masterly novels, Carson McCullers was equally accomplished, and equally moving, when writing in shorter forms. This Library of America volume brings together for the first time her twenty extraordinary stories, along with plays, essays, memoirs, and poems. Here are the indelible tales "Madame Zilensky and the King of Finland" and "A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud." as well as her previously uncollected story about the civil rights movement, "The March"; her award- winning Broadway play The Member of the Wedding and the unpublished teleplay The Sojourner; twenty-two essays; and the revealing unfinished memoir Illumination and Night Glare. This wide-ranging gathering of shorter works reveals new depths and dimensions of the writer whom V. S. Pritchett praised for her "courageous imagination--one that is bold enough to consider the terrible in human nature without loss of nerve, calm, dignity, or love." LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Six stories including "Wunderkind," "A Domestic Dilemma," and "The Sojourner" accompany The Ballad of the Sad Café, a novella about shattered dreams in a small Southern town. Reprint. 15,000 first printing.

More than thirty years after it was written, the autobiography of Carson McCullers, Illumination and Night Glare , will be published for the first time. McCullers, one of the most gifted writers of her generation—the author of Member of the Wedding, Reflections in a Golden Eye , and The Ballad of Sad Cafe —died of a stroke at the age of fifty before finishing this, her last manuscript. Editor Carlos L. Dews has faithfully brought her story back to life, complete with never-before-published letters between McCullers and her husband Reeves, and an outline of her most famous novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter .Looking back over her life from a precocious childhood in Georgia to her painful decline from a series of crippling strokes, McCullers offers poignant and unabashed remembrances of her early writing success, her family attachments, a troubled marriage to a failed writer, and friendships with literary and film luminaries (Gypsy Rose Lee, Richard Wright, Isak Dinesen, John Huston, Marilyn Monroe), and the intense relationships of the important women in her life.

'A masterpiece . . . as mature and finished as Henry James's The Turn of the Screw' TimeSet on a Southern army base in the 1930s, Reflections in a Golden Eye tells the story of Captain Penderton, a bisexual whose life is upset by the arrival of Major Langdon, a charming womanizer who has an affair with Penderton's tempestuous and flirtatious wife, Leonora. Upon the novel's publication in 1941, reviewers were unsure of what to make of its relatively scandalous subject matter. But a critic for Time magazine wrote, "In almost any hands, such material would yield a rank fruitcake of mere arty melodrama. But Carson McCullers tells her tale with simplicity, insight, and a rare gift of phrase." Written during a time when McCullers's own marriage to Reeves was on the brink of collapse

A collection of Carson McCullers' stories, including her novella "The Ballad of the Sad Cafe" and "Wunderkind".