The Ballad of the Sad Cafe: and Other Stories

Book Description

A classic work that has charmed generations of readers, this collection assembles Carson McCullers's best stories, including her beloved novella "The Ballad of the Sad Caf." A haunting tale of a human triangle that culminates in an astonishing brawl, the novella introduces readers to Miss Amelia, a formidable southern woman whose caf serves as the town's gathering place. 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. Newly reset and available for the first time in a handsome trade paperback edition, The Ballad of the Sad Caf is a brilliant study of love and longing from one of the South's finest writers.

Customer Reviews:

Southern Rococo.......2007-05-24

The title novella of this Carson McCullers collection is much loved, although I'd be hard-pressed to explain why. It takes place in a small Georgia milltown in the first half of the century, and involves a love triangle concerning a gay hunchbacked gossipy dwarf; his cousin, the six-foot-two, cross-eyed, androgynous town despot, Miss Amelia; and her ex-husband, who robs gas stations and carries in his pocket a salted human ear he gained in a razor fight. Like the short stories and the later plays of Tennessee Williams, this novella seems to go beyond mere Southern Gothic to yet another level, more like that of what we might call Southern Baroque or Rococo; McCullers seems to be pushing herself constantly as far as she can go. It's not enough for McCullers, for example, that Miss Amelie likes to fidget with the gallstones she once had removed that she keeps in a curio case: later she has them set in a watch fob to give to her beloved cousin the hunchback. The larger (and intelligent) points McCullers makes in the novella about the nature of love, particularly concerning the roles of the lover and the beloved, seem occulted rather than clarified by the freakshow approach to the characters.

This is a shame, because McCullers is certainly intelligent, and she certainly can write, as she shows not only by her gorgeous descriptions of setting in his story but also in the fine shorter pieces here that follow the title novella. I'd recommend starting elsewhere with her fiction than this novella: here she just seems trying to top herself with outlandish details and effects rather than strive for something more honest.

Carson's Ballad is Beautiful.......2007-03-06

I was first turned onto Carson McCullers in a southern lit class in college. Sad Cafe was required reading, and one of the best stories I read that whole semester. I found myself reading it again and again because I just liked the way the story sounded in my head. McCullers has such a simple technique for description and writing. It's so easy to understand, and it stays with you. Unlike a lot of stories, it's uncluttered and her writing is the bare soul of her characters.

Beware, if you are new to southern lit you might want to know a few tips...stories are usually a tragedy, the characters are usually flawed emotionally and often physically, and setting plays a huge part of the story. Don't forget language either. Carson McCullers captures the true essence of all of these in her writing. Sad Cafe is no exception.

It is a story that stays with you in some way. I know it has definitely stayed with me. I find myself wanting to pick it up again and again. Whether you are from the South or not, don't miss out on this beautiful and haunting piece of literature.

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter/Reflections in a Golden Eye/The Ballad of the Sad Cafe/The Member of the Wedding/The Clock Without Hands (Library of America)

Average customer rating:

The American Jane Austen?
Magnificent McCullers
The unique lady of the "South"

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter/Reflections in a Golden Eye/The Ballad of the Sad Cafe/The Member of the Wedding/The Clock Without Hands (Library of America)
Carson McCullers
Manufacturer: Library of America
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Collected Stories of Carson McCullers, including The Member of the Wedding and The Ballad of the Sad Cafe
Flannery O'Connor : Collected Works : Wise Blood / A Good Man Is Hard to Find / The Violent Bear It Away / Everything that Rises Must Converge / Essays & Letters (Library of America)
Eudora Welty : Complete Novels: The Robber Bridegroom, Delta Wedding, The Ponder Heart, Losing Battles, The Optimist's Daughter (Library of America)
The Lonely Hunter: A Biography of Carson McCullers
Illumination and Night Glare: The Unfinished Autobiography of Carson McCullers (Wisconsin Studies in Autobiography)

ASIN: 1931082030
Release Date: 2001-09-27

Book Description

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. Two shorter works, Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941) and The Ballad of the Sad Café (1943), use 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. In Clock Without Hands (1960), the story of a terminally ill druggist, McCullers produces some of her most forceful and indignant social criticism.

Edited by Carlos Dews.

Customer Reviews:

The American Jane Austen?.......2003-12-24

I have read many novels by many writers, both American and foreign, but it's been a good long while since I've read something so penetrating and perceptive as Carson McCuller's first and last novels. The characters in the books, their lives and personalities, are so well thought-out and delineated that you have to wonder how a woman of 23 could put something like this together. Anyway, below is a synopsis of each story in this volume.

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is the longest of Carson McCullers' novels, and the first. She wrote it in the late `30s, and published it in 1940, when she was 23. It's an incredible first novel, and amazingly prescient and wise for someone of her age, era, and upbringing. The story revolves around a deaf mute, John Singer, who works engraving silverware in a small city in the South somewhere. He has only one friend in the world, another deaf mute who works for his cousin, making candy. As the story begins the candymaker (named Antanopolous) is committed to an asylum, and Singer moves from the home they shared, and slowly begins to acquire a circle of other friends. Principle in this circle are four people: Mick, the daughter of his landlords at the rooming house he lives in; Biff, who runs the diner where he takes his meals; Blount, another denizen of the diner, who wishes to unionize the local mill-workers; and Dr.Copeland, a black man who rages against the injustice of white society towards him and his race. The heart of the story is a character study of these five people, with alternating chapters following the one and then the other. Each is intelligent, in his or her own way, and each has special insights into the world around them. How these characters interact, and the relationships between them and the rest of the world, make the heart of the story and most of the book.

Reflections in a Golden Eye is a shorter story, one of McCullers' novels that is really more of a novella. The plot revolves around a love triangle that develops between two officers on an Army base, and the wife of one of them. There's also a strange, solitary, enigmatic private who tends the horses on the base, and he interacts with the other characters. Frankly, I didn't enjoy this story as much as The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. The characters weren't anywhere near as believable, and their motivations weren't as transparent or understandable. The ending was also somewhat predictable.

The Ballad of the Sad Café is the shortest of McCullers' novels or novellas, weighing in at 60 pages. It's the story of a strange, unpredictable relationship between the standoffish businesswoman who dominates the culture of a small town, and a dwarf hunchback who shows up one day claiming to be her long-lost nephew. How the two of them interact in the story is strange, to say the least, and not wholly explained in the story. This creates an enigmatic atmosphere, and as the story progresses and it becomes obvious we're not going to receive an explanation of things, you find yourself re-reading passages looking for clues as to motivations. I enjoyed this story much more than Reflections in a Golden Eye, perhaps almost as much as The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.

The Member of the Wedding is perhaps McCullers' most strange work. The heart of the book is built around the fantastic intentions and beliefs of a twelve-year-old girl. In the first portion of the book, she's known as Frankie. Later, when she gets the idea she's going to leave with her older brother on his honeymoon, she changes her name to F. Jasmine, and the book follows that convention. Once it develops that she can't go with the brother and his new bride (you knew this was going to happen) she becomes Frances. There isn't much of a plot other than this girl fantasizing about all of the things she's going to be or do, and looking down her nose at all the common people who surround her, who she thinks are beneath her.

Clock Without Hands is the best of McCullers' books other than The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. I now wonder if the length of the books had something to do with whether I liked them or not. She seems to have been able, in the longer books, to build her characters more, and have more plot twists. Clock Without Hands is about a dying pharmacist in a small Georgia town, and the events surrounding his death, but it really turns out to be more about one of his acquaintances, a senile old judge who imagines himself a great leader of the opposition to the desegregation movement. The episodes of the Civil Rights movement, as McCullers recreates them, become at times farcical and silly, and the resistance to the movement altogether silly and irrational.

Library of America volumes are wonderful to hold and read, and this is no exception. The type is clear, the book handy to hold or slip into a pocket. Given McCullers' stature as a writer, I think I'm going to value this book for a good long while.

Magnificent McCullers.......2002-03-11

Carson McCullers, one of America's greatest Southern writers, was often misunderstood, as many people were put off by or unwilling to deal with her (at the time) controversial subject matter. MCCullers used the grotesque as exaggerated symbols of everyday experience. The loneliness and isolation of her gothic-like characters were merely extreme examples of feelings we all have, though magnified and intensified to the nth degree.

Tennessee Williams, in his introduction to MCCullers' "Reflections in a Golden Eye", posed the question (in a mock dialogue) most people asked about writers of the 'gothic' school such as Carson McCullers, Flannery O'Connor, Katherine Anne Porter and Eudora Welty: "Why do they write about such dreadful things?" Williams replies, " In my opinion it is most simply definable as a sense, an intuition of an underlying dreadfulness in modern society.. Why have they got to use..symbols of the grotesque and the violent? Because a book is short and a man's life is long... The awfulness has to be compressed."

McCullers, unlike any writer I have ever read, pierces the heart of themes such as love, isolation, and loneliness with her lucid, poetic prose. Tennessee Williams, in Virginia Spencer Carr's biography of McCullers summed up McCullers' writing as follows: "I have used the word 'heart', but it is not an adequate word to describe the core of Carson McCullers' genius....I believe, in fact I know, that there are many, many with heart who lack the need or gift to express it. And therefore Carson McCullers is what I would call a necessary writer: She owned the heart and the deep understanding of it, but in addition she had that 'tongue of angels' that gave her power to sing of it, to make of it an anthem."

The unique lady of the "South".......2001-10-20

Until very recently, it was quite difficult to find a nice hardback copy of Mc Culler's novels. Each one of them is absolutely priceless and unforgettable; believe me when I tell you that "The Ballad of the Sad Café" is one of those stories that long remain on your mind. Mc Culler's novels, clearly influenced by Faulkner, surpass the master himself in magnetism, , power of storytelling and above all, characterization. If you add to all this a dose of gothic dark strangely ambivalent sense of humour, the result is certainly a writer utterly impossible to classify, novels that you really enjoy reading and characters that you are very unlikely to forget. Besides I am fully in love with the Library of America hardback editions and Mc Cullers certainly deserves to be included in this collection.
Later, if you want to give yourself a treat, go and buy her autobiography, although unfinished, a memorable book.

Collected Stories of Carson McCullers, including The Member of the Wedding and The Ballad of the Sad Cafe

Average customer rating:

A master of characterization and setting
Interesting...
Fine, neglected writer, on her way back!
Depressing themes emerge
A wonderful collection

Collected Stories of Carson McCullers, including The Member of the Wedding and The Ballad of the Sad Cafe
Carson McCullers
Manufacturer: Mariner Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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The Heart is a Lonely Hunter/Reflections in a Golden Eye/The Ballad of the Sad Cafe/The Member of the Wedding/The Clock Without Hands (Library of America)
Reflections in a Golden Eye
Clock Without Hands
The Lonely Hunter: A Biography of Carson McCullers
The Mortgaged Heart

ASIN: 0395925053

Book Description

Carson McCullers--novelist, dramatist, poet--was at the peak of her powers as a writer of short fiction. Here are nineteen stories that explore her signature themes: wounded adolescence, loneliness in marriage, and the tragicomedy of life in the South. Here too are "The Member of the Wedding" and "The Ballad of the Sad Cafe," novellas that Tennessee Williams judged to be "assuredly among the masterpieces of our language." (A Mariner Reissue)

Customer Reviews:

A master of characterization and setting.......2004-02-18

What strikes me most about McCullers is the simple yet rich complexity of her characters. While some of the earlier stories in this book felt too incomplete for me, as if they were more vignettes than stories, the tales grew stronger as I read on. The Haunted Boy is my favorite because it resonates with a sad truthfulness as a boy struggles to cope with a tragic event from the past which he's yet to deal with emotionally.

I think any true fan of literary storytelling will admit that, though perhaps not always perfect, Carson McCullers' writing as a whole is a sample of this genre at its best.

Interesting..........2001-11-15

I have always read stories in the past that gave me feelings right away. After reading these short stories, I was somewhat confused why McCullers didn't elaborate, or why she ended the story where she did. It was only after reading her biography, that I began to reread the stories and became obsessed with all of them. The meanings became clearer, the ideas behind them were revealed, and she has become my favorite author. I would recommend this to anyone, and I would also recommend her novels too. Enjoy.

Fine, neglected writer, on her way back!.......2001-06-28

I've loved Carson McCullers for years, and her complete works have only been sporadically available. Her miniatures are near perfectly realized works of literary art, and this collection is a fine introduction to a great writer from the south who seems to have dropped of the critical radar. Her output is quite small, finely honed, and the prose is like a clear blue sky. Her longer works are worth searching for, and I recently noted that The Library of America has been hard at work making sure that Carson will continue to be read....!

Depressing themes emerge.......2001-05-04

I'm not a fan of the open-ended short story, being a tale that is redolent with symbolism that I'm certain is there but just don't "get." Unfortunately McCullers' tales seem to fall into this category so I was not terribly thrilled with the stories. However, as a body of work they were interesting--the themes of lost childhood, changing sibling relationships, disgruntled musical prodigies, and general loneliness / rejection emerge and give a nice sense of continuity to the works. The inclusion of two of her novellas is nice; I appreciate the longer story format for the ability to get to know the characters and setting a little better.

Overall I'd recommend picking up McCullers' novellas and if you're thrilled with those, tackle her short stories.

A wonderful collection.......1999-09-29

This book contains a wealth of moving stories by a great writer, including a well-written introduction by her biographer. This would definitely be one of my desert island books.

Average customer rating:

sure, McCullers' concerns are weighty and everything...
A HAUNTING STORY
Unrequited Love, McCullers' Theme of Life
A good quote
1 hour of my life that I can never get back.

Ballad Of The Sad Cafe
Carson Mccullers
Manufacturer: Bantam
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Mass Market Paperback

Classics | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

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Hamlet (Global Shakespeare Series)
The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Writings
Four Major Plays: A Doll's House, Ghosts, Hedda Gabler, The Master Builder (Oxford World's Classics)
A Short Guide to Writing About Literature (Short Guides Series)
The Member of the Wedding

ASIN: 0553272543
Release Date: 1983-07-01

Customer Reviews:

sure, McCullers' concerns are weighty and everything..........2006-09-24

but I think you do yourself a disservice if you overlook her bemusement. Take these lines for instance:

People were torn between the longing for the good taste of pork, and the fear of death. It was a time of waste and confusion.

Pretty concise if you ask me. And, by the way, Mofo Moron- did you really need to go to college and read a book before you came to the conclusion that it was alright for you to hop in the sack with your cousin? The shortest distance between two points is, after all, a straight line.

A HAUNTING STORY.......2006-02-22

Read this one years and years ago and it has never left me. It is absolutely haunting. It examines a side of love in a way most of us do not consider. This short story is indeed filled with some very strange characters, as one reviewer pointed out, yet if we look close, we can see these same characters float through our lives daily. I am not sure what is meant by the work being "art." I do know a good story when I read one though and this certainly fits the bill. The author is a true teller of stories. Recommend this one highly.

Unrequited Love, McCullers' Theme of Life.......2005-08-16

In The Ballad of the Sad Café, McCullers displays her most vivid example of unrequited love with the triangle created by the story's three main characters. The American Heritage Dictionary defines a ballad as "a narrative poem, often of folk origin and intended to be sung, consisting of simple stanzas and usually having a recurrent refrain." Miss Amelia's love for Cousin Lymon, Cousin Lymon's love for Marvin Macy, and Marvin Macy's love for Miss Amelia can be seen as this refrain. It is with this love triangle that McCullers delineates her brilliant observation of the relationship between the lover and the beloved. She describes love "as a joint experience between two persons," but explains that the experience is often very different for those involved. The lover has a store of love that needs to be projected; the object of this love is incidental. It is the love itself that must be spent, and "the value and quantity of any love is determined solely by the lover himself."

She writes: "It is for this reason that most of us would rather love than be loved. Almost everyone wants to be the lover. And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being beloved is intolerable to many. The beloved fears and hates the lover, and with the best of reasons. For the lover is forever trying to strip bare the beloved."

The lover is the Enthusiastic Taker, while the beloved is expected to be the Reluctant Giver. The three characters in the story are doubly tragic, because they inhabit, at one time or another, both roles. Miss Amelia is the most sympathetic "point" of the triangle. Because her harsh treatment of Marvin Macy is in the past, she is unable to undo it. Her role as beloved came about without the lesson she learns as the lover of Cousin Lymon. Following this logic, it would seem that Marvin Macy, then, is the least sympathetic "point." One considers his spiteful treatment of Cousin Lymon abhorrent, especially since he was treated the same way by Miss Amelia. But the reason he is not the least sympathetic is because he can be somewhat forgiven for forgetting his experience as the lover, considering the gap in time and his stay in the penitentiary. What one is left with, then, is Cousin Lymon, who becomes the least sympathetic of them all. His experiences as lover and beloved are happening concurrently. His behavior is not redeemable; one gets the feeling that he should know better. The symmetry McCullers displays with this triangle creates a memorable and educational structure, indeed.

So, the question begs to be asked: Can anything be done, in McCullers' view, to attain mutual love, or are we perpetual slaves to immutable biology and the fundamentals of human relationships? McCullers gives one hope with her short story "A Tree, A Rock, A Cloud." In this story a man in a bar stops a young boy by telling him he loves him. He then proceeds to explain that "`With me [love] is a science.'" He believes that the reason love fails is because men "`start at the wrong end of love.'" Without guidance of any kind, men "undertake the most dangerous and sacred experience in God's earth. They fall in love with a woman.'" He states that men should learn to love step-by-step, by first learning to love these objects of nature, before moving on to the treacherous endeavor of loving a woman. Love should be practiced, reflected upon, spread around. The lover must learn how to love one step at a time; and then, perhaps, it becomes possible to attain beneficial love that feeds the soul rather than love that eats it away. This is the last hope, it seems, for McCullers in her search for mutual love. One gets the impression of a cautious optimist, protecting herself diligently from the pains of unrequited love, but nonetheless unwilling - or perhaps incapable - of giving up the endeavor altogether.

A good quote.......2005-08-02

I know other people have alluded to the area where this sentence exists (in talking about the lover and the beloved), but I believe this sentence specifically to be so powerful..."...the value and quality of any love is determined solely by the lover himself."...this follows talk of how someone could be ghastly, but that doesn't matter to the person who loves him, because that love is just as powerful as any. On the other hand, someone could be a great man, but if his lover is induced to love him "violently" and impurely, then theirs will be that kind of love, and not as true as the other. How much someone is loved is truly in the eye (and hands) of the beholder...

1 hour of my life that I can never get back........2005-07-25

This is a dreadful story about a bunch of cynical losers who screw each other over in this tiny town of like 50 people where there's absolutely nothing to do but drink oneself into total obliteration. In this story, there are three main characters. Miss Amelia is a 6-foot-2, burly, lonely, stingy, argumentative 40-year-old woman who is in love with her hunchback cousin. Cousin Lymon has a severe case of short-man's complex. He is the apple of Miss Amelia's eye, but he is in love with Miss Amelia's ex-husband Marvin Macy. Go figure. He's severely hunched over at crotch level and walks around with his toosh in the air. He's configured to be (...), so therefore he probably is. Marvin and Miss Amelia were only married for 10 days because she had no interest in him. One can only wonder why the dumb broad married him in the first place. Wow I just realized that this was a love triangle. I still think that it was 72 pages that never should have been printed. What a total waste of paper, of printing resources, and of my time.

I disagree with the previous reviews stating that this was somehow supposed to be "an artistic book," because I saw absolutely nothing artistic about it. The only thing I learned was that it is okay to want to jump in the sack with a cousin.

I want my money back.

The Ballad Of The Sad Cafe (Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations)

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The Ballad Of The Sad Cafe (Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations)

Manufacturer: Chelsea House Publications
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0791081257

THE BALLAD OF THE SAD CAFE THE NOVELS AND STORIES OF CARSON MCCULLERS

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THE BALLAD OF THE SAD CAFE THE NOVELS AND STORIES OF CARSON MCCULLERS

Manufacturer: Houghton Mifflin
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000E6366K

The Ballad Of The Sad Cafe and other stories

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The Ballad Of The Sad Cafe and other stories
Carson McCullers
Manufacturer: Bantam
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: 055320453X

The Ballad of the Sad Cafe: Carson McCullers' Novella Adapted for the Stage

Average customer rating:

Highly recommended.
Pretty Good
Pretty Good

The Ballad of the Sad Cafe: Carson McCullers' Novella Adapted for the Stage
Edward Albee , and Carson McCullers
Manufacturer: Scribner
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0743225317

Customer Reviews:

Highly recommended........2000-01-02

Carson McCullers is a wonderfully compassionate author and this novel showcases the best of her abilities.

Pretty Good.......1999-04-29

A grotesque human triangle in a primitive Southern town...A young boy learning the difficult lessions of manhood...A fateful encounter with his native land and former love...These are [arts of the world of Carson McCullers - a world of the lost, the injured, the eternal strangers at life's feast. Here are brilliant revelations of love and longing, bitter heartbreak and occasional happiness - tales that probe the very heart of our lives. It was a good story. she was not a very good person - nor was he. He a sponge who only cared about himself and she was a niggerdly woman, although the town really needed her.

Pretty Good.......1999-04-29

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The Ballad of the Sad Cafe: the Novels and Stories of Carson McCullers
Carson McCullers
Manufacturer: Houghton Mifflin
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000HJPBMQ

Average customer rating:

The Ballad of the Sad Cafe

Manufacturer: Bantam
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: 0553115324

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Fiction

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