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The Ballad of the Sad Café

‘Brilliant … a panorama of a remarkable talent … McCullers’s finest stories’ The New York Times

Few writers have expressed loneliness, the need for human understanding and the search for love with such power and poetic sensibility as the American writer Carson McCullers, and The Ballad of the Sad Café collects her best-loved novella together with six short stories, published in Penguin Modern Classics.

Miss Amelia Evans, tall, strong and nobody’s fool, runs a small-town store. Except for a disastrous marriage that lasted just ten days, she has always lived alone.

Then Cousin Lymon appears from nowhere, a strutting hunchback who steals Miss Amelia’s heart.

Together they transform the store into a lively, popular café where the locals come to drink and gossip. But when her rejected and dangerous ex-husband Marvin Macy returns, the result is a bizarre love triangle that brings with it violence, hatred and betrayal.

Among other fine works, the collection also includes ‘Wunderkind’, McCullers’s first published story written when she was only seventeen, about a musical prodigy who suddenly realizes she will not go on to become a great pianist.

This play has a cast of 14 men and 6 women. Amelia, the proprietor of the Sad Cafe, throws her new husband out of their bedroom on their wedding night.

Torn between anger and desire the husband finally leaves town only to return some years later to find Amelia showering all her affection on a dwarf cousin who has come to live with her.

At their first meeting the dwarf is hopelessly attracted to the husband. In turn, the husband moves back into the Sad Cafe, threatening to run away with the dwarf if Amelia objects.

The day of reckoning soon arrives and the husband and wife meet to settle their differences with their bare hands.

The Ballad of the Sad Café

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