Carson McCullers Books

At the height of her literary career, Carson McCullers showcases her exceptional talent in short fiction, blending her skills as a novelist, dramatist, and poet. Her work reflects deep emotional insight and explores complex themes of loneliness, identity, and the human experience, captivating readers with her unique narrative style and rich character development.

"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story about the civil rights movement, "The March"; her award-winning Broadway play The Member of the Wedding and the unpublished teleplay The Sojourner; twenty-two essays; and the revealing unfinished memoir Illumination and Night Glare.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.""--Dust jacket

A collection of Carson McCullers' work, including stories, essays, articles, poems, and her writing on writing. These pieces, written mostly before McCullers was nineteen, provide insight into her life and her gifts and growth as a writer. It contains the working outline of The Mute, which became her novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.

Carson McCullers’ prodigious first novel was published to instant acclaim when she was just twenty-three. Set in a small town in the middle of the deep South, it is the story of John Singer, a lonely deaf-mute, and a disparate group of people who are drawn towards his kind, sympathetic nature. The owner of the café where Singer eats every day, a young girl desperate to grow up, an angry drunkard, a frustrated black doctor: each pours their heart out to Singer, their silent confidant, and he in turn changes their disenchanted lives in ways they could never imagine.

With 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.

When Cousin Lymon, a dwarf and a hunchback, arrives at Miss Amelia's store, he releases feelings of tenderness in Miss Amelia's hardened heart. Together they transform the store into a cafe. But their contentment is to be short lived, for Miss Amelia's estranged husband finds his way back to her.

His hand sought the adjacent flesh and sorrow paralleled desire in the immense complexity of love.

Set in Georgia on the eve of court-ordered integration, Clock Without Hands contains McCullers's most poignant statement on race, class, and justice. A small-town druggist dying of leukemia calls himself and his community to account in this tale of change and changelessness, of death and the death-in-life that is hate. It is a tale, as McCullers herself wrote, of "response and responsibility -- of a man toward his own livingness".

Set on a Southern army base in the 1930s, this novel 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. schovat popis

At age 82, Clifton Fadiman continues his prolific publishing career, here presenting 62 of the world's best short stories from 16 countries. His criteria? "Each story had to be both interesting and of high literary merit." Fadiman fulfills both requirements and much more, offering a cornucopia of superior 20th-century writers that includes Franz Kafka, D. H. Lawrence, Isaac Babel, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, John Cheever, Sean O'Faolain, Graham Greene, Robert Penn Warren, Colette, John Updike, Donald Barthelme, and James Thurber. (Regrettably, J. D. Salinger is not included due to lack of permission.) Here is a truly remarkable collection of this century's short stories that readers from all over the world will read with delight.