The Ballad of the Sad Cafe and Other Stories
In the title novella, Miss Amelia Evans — a tall, solitary, and formidable woman — runs a store in a sleepy Southern mill town and keeps mostly to herself, until a small hunchbacked stranger arrives claiming to be her cousin. Improbably, Amelia takes him in, and her store blossoms into a warm, lively café at the heart of the town. But the return of Amelia's estranged, dangerous ex-husband sets a strange and unequal love triangle spinning toward a bitter reckoning.
Alongside this classic of Southern Gothic fiction, the collection gathers other stories and pieces by Carson McCullers, each preoccupied with loneliness, unrequited longing, and the tender strangeness of outsiders and misfits.
Spare, haunting, and compassionate, these stories confirm McCullers as one of the great chroniclers of the isolated human heart.
A solitary, formidable Southern woman whose life is upended by a stranger.
Amelia's dangerous estranged husband.
The hunchbacked stranger who transforms Amelia's store into a café.