The Mortgaged Heart


Book Description

“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.




Reflections in a Golden Eye


Book Description

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.




The Heart is a Lonely Hunter


Book Description

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."




The Member of the Wedding


Book Description

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.




Collected Stories of Carson McCullers


Book Description

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




Understanding Carson McCullers


Book Description

Carson McCullers was deemed the "find of the decade" when she appeared on the literary scene at the age of twenty-three and is best remembered for her celebrated novels "The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter" and "The Member of the Wedding." This book provides a balanced introductory study of her major fiction and shows her as more than a lesbian novelist.




The Heart is a Lonely Hunter


Book Description




Buffalo for the Broken Heart


Book Description

For twenty years Dan O’Brien struggled to make ends meet on his cattle ranch in South Dakota. But when a neighbor invited him to lend a hand at the annual buffalo roundup, O’Brien was inspired to convert his own ranch, the Broken Heart, to buffalo. Starting with thirteen calves, “short-necked, golden balls of wool,” O’Brien embarked on a journey that returned buffalo to his land for the first time in more than a century and a half. Buffalo for the Broken Heart is at once a tender account of the buffaloes’ first seasons on the ranch and an engaging lesson in wildlife ecology. Whether he’s describing the grazing pattern of the buffalo, the thrill of watching a falcon home in on its prey, or the comical spectacle of a buffalo bull wallowing in the mud, O’Brien combines a novelist’s eye for detail with a naturalist’s understanding to create an enriching, entertaining narrative.




All This Could Be Different


Book Description

2022 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST ONE OF THE LOS ANGELES TIMES' TOP 5 FICTION BOOKS OF THE YEAR ONE OF TIME AND SLATE'S TOP 10 BOOKS OF THE YEAR Named one of the BEST BOOKS OF 2022 by NPR, Vogue, Vulture, BuzzFeed, Harper's Bazaar, and more “One of the buzziest, most human novels of the year…breathless, dizzying, and completely beautiful.” —Vogue “Dazzling and wholly original...[written] with such mordant wit, insight, and specificity, it feels like watching a new literary star being born in real time.” —Entertainment Weekly From a brilliant new voice comes an electrifying novel of a young immigrant building a life for herself—a warm, dazzling, and profound saga of queer love, friendship, work, and precarity in twenty-first century America Graduating into the long maw of an American recession, Sneha is one of the fortunate ones. She’s moved to Milwaukee for an entry-level corporate job that, grueling as it may be, is the key that unlocks every door: she can pick up the tab at dinner with her new friend Tig, get her college buddy Thom hired alongside her, and send money to her parents back in India. She begins dating women—soon developing a burning crush on Marina, a beguiling and beautiful dancer who always seems just out of reach. But before long, trouble arrives. Painful secrets rear their heads; jobs go off the rails; evictions loom. Sneha struggles to be truly close and open with anybody, even as her friendships deepen, even as she throws herself headlong into a dizzying romance with Marina. It’s then that Tig begins to draw up a radical solution to their problems, hoping to save them all. A beautiful and capacious novel rendered in singular, unforgettable prose, All This Could Be Different is a wise, tender, and riveting group portrait of young people forging love and community amidst struggle, and a moving story of one immigrant’s journey to make her home in the world.




Carson McCullers: Stories, Plays & Other Writings (LOA #287)


Book Description

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.