Recommended Reading: Carson McCullers's novella "The Ballad of the Sad Café"--Loneliness and Longing in the American South

Carson McCullers's phenomenal prose shines throughout this magnificent novella. The level of poignancy and verisimilitude is transmitted with poetic evocations and a stunning, thorough outline of characters. Miss Amelia, the rough, stubborn, overtly Southern woman, who owns a distillery in "a dreary town", has come across a hunchback named Cousin Lymon, whom she takes into her own house, eventually falling in love with him. Yet Marvin Macy, her ex-husband, has just gotten out of a penitentiary in Atlanta, and is out hungry for revenge. Meanwhile, Cousin Lymon and Miss Amelia open up a small café where the people in the small town can gather and, without any remorse whatsoever, "forget the deep bitter knowing that you are not worth much in this world..." There is a tinge of the Southern Gothic style that came to define the great American writers from that region, something like the overt fascination with the grotesque and the anomalous. Furthermore, McCullers's sensual conjuration of scenes is evident in this short work, as when she writes: "It was such a night when it is good to hear from faraway, across the dark fields, the slow song of a Negro on his way to make love." And even her description of a chain gang singing while laboring under the sun is meritorious writing: "One dark voice will start a phrase, half-sung, and like a question. And after a moment another voice will join in, soon the whole gang will be singing. The voices are dark in the golden glare, the music intricately blended, both somber and joyful. The music will swell until at last it seems that the sound does not come from the twelve men on the gang, but from the earth itself, or the wide sky..." Buy at http://www.barnesandnobles.com/