In one volume, the complete short fiction of the author of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, including her two most renowned novellas. 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 including loneliness in marriage and the tragicomedy of life in the South. Included in this volume are “The Member of the Wedding” and “The Ballad of the Sad Café,” novellas that Tennessee Williams judged to be “assuredly among the masterpieces of our language.” “McCullers patented the Southern gothic genre that embraces grotesque, morbid characters with such pervading themes as unrequited love and wounded adolescence. Largely set in the South and richly autobiographical, her writings have endured because of their great power and originality.” —Library Journal

A novel that became an award-winning play and a major film, and that has charmed generations of readers, The Member of the Wedding is a story of the inimitable twelve-year-old Frankie, who is utterly bored with her life until she hears about her older brother’s wedding. Bolstered by lively conversations with her house servant, Berenice, and her six-year-old cousin—and her own unbridled imagination—Frankie takes on an overly active role in the wedding, even hoping to go (uninvited) on the honeymoon. This story is a marvelous study of the agony of adolescence and of wanting to be part of something larger and more accepting than yourself. The Member of the Wedding showcases Carson McCullers at her most sensitive, astute, and lasting best. Penguin Random House Canada is proud to bring you classic works of literature in e-book form, with the highest quality production values. Find more today and rediscover books you never knew you loved.

When she was only twenty-three, Carson McCullers's first novel created a literary sensation. She was very special, one of America's superlative writers who conjures up a vision of existence as terrible as it is real, who takes us on shattering voyages into the depths of the spiritual isolation that underlies the human condition. This novel is the work of a supreme artist, Carson McCullers's enduring masterpiece. The heroine is the strange young girl, Mick Kelly. The setting is a small Southern town, the cosmos universal and eternal. The characters are the damned, the voiceless, the rejected. Some fight their loneliness with violence and depravity, Some with sex or drink, and some -- like Mick -- with a quiet, intensely personal search for beauty. "From the Paperback edition."

Winner of the Publishing Triangle Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction, Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award, and a Lambda Literary Award Finalist for the National Book Award Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction How do you tell the real story of someone misremembered—an icon and idol—alongside your own? Jenn Shapland’s celebrated debut is both question and answer: an immersive, surprising exploration of one of America’s most beloved writers, alongside a genre-defying examination of identity, queerness, memory, obsession, and love. Shapland is a graduate student when she first uncovers letters written to Carson McCullers by a woman named Annemarie. Though Shapland recognizes herself in the letters, which are intimate and unabashed in their feelings, she does not see McCullers as history has portrayed her. Her curiosity gives way to fixation, not just with this newly discovered side of McCullers’s life, but with how we tell queer love stories. Why, Shapland asks, are the stories of women paved over by others’ narratives? What happens when constant revision is required of queer women trying to navigate and self-actualize in straight spaces? And what might the tracing of McCullers’s life—her history, her secrets, her legacy—reveal to Shapland about herself? In smart, illuminating prose, Shapland interweaves her own story with McCullers’s to create a vital new portrait of one of our nation’s greatest literary treasures, and shows us how the writers we love and the stories we tell about ourselves make us who we are.

A reprint of the 1941 novel about the sad and tragic lives of the Pendertons and the Langdons, two military couples living on an army base in the American South in the 1930s.

A landmark gathering of McCullers’ shorter works, including all her published stories, plays, essays, poems, and an unfinished autobiography 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.

“Essential reading for any serious beginning writer . . . illuminating.” —San Francisco Chronicle Carson McCullers is renowned for her Southern Gothic fiction and for such modern classics as The Member of the Wedding. This collection includes an assortment of her earliest work, written mostly before she was nineteen. Included are stories, essays, articles, poems, and writing about writing—including the working outline of “The Mute,” which would become her bestselling novel The Heart is a Lonely Hunter—as well as an introduction by Joyce Carol Oates. As new generations continue to discover the work of Carson McCullers, this volume provides both an enjoyable read and an inspiring look at the beginning of a brilliant literary career.