Queued ( )

I chill to the precise usage of prose and the word sketching of the masters. it takes a lot to get five stars from me these days, but Ms. McCullers has done it with the title piece alone. Sitting at the head of the table of Southern Gothics, she can pass the plate to William Faulkner on her right side and Harry Cres at her left. Am I saying her prose exceeds Faulkner. Yes. It does as she works for every word, while Bill just sits there and rambles on over his whiskey. ( )

McCullers has a wonderfully poetic yet understated way of writing. This short story should be read in one sitting, without disturbance. It's a sharp observation of how life's odd situations alter relationships which results in the unjust and abrupt dissolution of the heroin's spirit. A beautifully written read, definately one for reflection. ( )

The Ballad of the Sad Cafe is, in fact, sad. So sad it resonates with the sadness behind it: Carson McCullers must have been sad herself. It feels too personally acquainted with sad to have been fabricated; McCullers might have been a genius but I still think she didn’t entirely make this up.

McCullers tells a story of a doomed and miserable southern town, its misfits, and unrequited love. She has a tenderness for freaks--our protagonist, Miss Amelia, is a six-foot-two giantess who becomes hopeless obsessed with a warped hunchback. Miss Amelia is flint-spined, a bootlegging businesswoman with a ferocious streak, but, like the other characters in the story struck by love, is hopeless and floppy in the face of her beloved.

While the plot weaves its love triangle ways, the thrumming feeling of “there is no hope, there is no hope” runs beneath it. McCullers captures the stifling dullness of a southern small town but pins her characters to it like bugs under glass. Poor things.

This collection included several other short stories, most of which were riffs on love. Some were sensitive and lyrical: one touches on a wife’s alcoholism in suburbia, another the end of prodigy for a young girl. Others: slightly more forgettable. ( )

Carson McCuller's can cut into the private rooms lurking in our interiors and shine a small light showing us our forgotten emotions. ( )