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

I am loving this book! If you read this in your school days, let me encourage you to pick it up again. I started with Ballad of the Sad Cafe and jumped around from there. What rich worlds and characters she creates! The issues of women’s autonomy, gender identity, racial and class prejudice are part of what each story encompasses but there are no lectures. She is writing without knowing the phrases we use or the “sides” we’ve taken now. She sees each character as a complex personality, and I was enthralled as I followed them through a world and lives that are both familiar and bizarre.

This is a great collection of stories. Many of them are written during her college years and reflect the conditions of student life--off campus--and therefore life of average New Yorkers trying to get ahead in life. Even at an early age McCullers shows a terrific eye and ear in her stories; and writes with a spareness that makes Hemingway look wordy. I love the way that she makes stories out of the most ordinary events and people. She is among the first, it seems to me, to realize the deep drama that underlies our usually ordinary lives. In my words, to see that fiction is merely real life in disguise.

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....!

although displaced, Carson McCullers remained a Southern womanwho wrote of a world of her own dark unblinking vision --she never sidestepped, never dissembled, never flinched.¶ included with this collection of her short stories are two of her novels most admired,The Ballad of the Sad Café and The Member of the Wedding.if these stir you in your deeps, please consider purchasing the hardbound Library of America collection of her complete novels.

I'm not going to rate the sex and violence levels in literature, but I do consider The Member of the Wedding the best coming of age story ever, even better than Catcher in the Rye or To Kill a Mockingbird. Carson McCullers was an incredible writer.

Carson McCullers was an amazing talent. This bargain-priced collection contains many of her short stories, and the two superb novellas, "The Ballad of the Sad Cafe," and "The Member of the Wedding."

I returned this edition to Amazon after reading The Ballad of the Sad Cafe only, because of the lack of a hypertext link from the table of contents to the beginning of each selection, and because of the frustrating number of typos in the text. To find the Ballad I had to scroll through the entire book looking for the beginning of the story, which the TOC showed was on page 195, but the Kindle edition doesn't include page numbers, only "location numbers", which bear no relation to the page nos. It was like reading a Project Gutenberg edition of a free classic, but I expected better for my $8.25, thank you.

Ballad of the Sad Café and Member of the Wedding were my favorites in this collection.

Great Collection from a great Author.. Everyone should read this book

very good service. Am enjoying the short stories so far as well. thank you.

Excellent book

So sad there is only one review of this book! I'd love to see Ms McCullers re-discovered, she's pure gold, 'The Member of the Wedding' one of the best books about being on the cusp of adolescence ever written.

The publisher should at least have the respect & courtesy to run the digitized version of the book through a basic spell check. The Kindle version is not worth the purchase. There are virtually OCR errors on EVERY page.