I enjoyed this, but after some years since reading it, I don't recall enough to discuss it. ( )

McCullers is at her best when her stories are about adolescents (almost always motherless, often gender-bending, and with a father who's a jeweler) on the cusp of change. But I loved immersing myself in her world in every story.

This collection of short pieces culminates with MEMBER OF THE WEDDING; but I've read that very recently, so it wasn't time for a re-read. For me it culminated with BALLAD OF THE SAD CAFE. This is a very sad piece (as the title warns) featuring a grotesque cast of characters and a miserable ending. It is not "my thing"; but it was still a story to grab me by the throat, and it provided all of the collection's best quotes.

"It is known that if a message is written with lemon juice on a clean sheet of paper there will be no sign of it. But if the paper is held for a moment to the fire then the letters turn brown and the meaning becomes clear. Imagine that the whiskey is fire and that the message is that which is known only in the soul of a man - then the worth of Miss Amelia's liquor can be understood."

"The atmosphere of a proper cafe implies these qualities: fellowship, the satisfactions of the belly, and a certain gaiety and grace of behavior." That should be put on a sign and sold to cafe owners everywhere.

"In order to come into the cafe you did not have to buy the dinner, or a portion of liquor. There were cold bottled drinks for a nickel. And if you could not even afford that, Miss Amelia had a drink called Cherry Juice which sold for a penny a glass... There, for a few hours at least, the deep bitter knowing that you are not worth much in this world could be laid low." ( )

To me the novella The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, with its theme of love as a dark and grotesque compulsion, is the standout in this collection. The accompanying short stories are so similar in tone that they come across more as sketches or character studies than completed works. And The Member of the Wedding I just don't know what to make of - is it coming of age, coming out, or the surrender/discovery of self?

I'd recommend going with the paper version of this book. My copy is the nook edition which has scanning typos like you'd see in a bad pdf and it looks like the kindle ebook has the same problem. The nook TOC is interactive at least, unlike the kindle. ( )

Though I enjoy much of McCuller's writing, I prefer her novels more and consider them far-surpassing her shorter works. I felt I was running out of time and therefore had to abandon what still remains in this book for me unread. ( )

I read much of this collection at the cabin of some friends in the mountains of western North Carolina. We ate fried green tomatoes and grits and listened to the rush and gurgle of the stream below. When not frolicking outside, I buried myself in this book and it was like spending time with a different kind of old friend. I'd read The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter in my youth, years before I lived in the South, and felt drawn into that world. My own darkness melded with the darkness of the novel and it felt right. Later I moved to the South, where I lived in various states over the next 10 years, and this also felt right. I embraced the melancholic decay I found there for I knew it as my familiar. I slipped that shroud on as if coming home to a place where I finally felt I belonged. The desperate summer heat, the slow talking natives, buttery grits, scuttling of giant roaches in the underbrush (and also regrettably in my toaster), kudzu jungles along the roadways: it all made a weird sort of sense. It felt desperate and crazy but so did I, and so it seemed normal.

I purchased this particular copy of the Collected Stories of Carson McCullers as a gift for my sister one year. Oddly enough I had not read it, nor did I read it until just now, many years later, when during a book purge she asked me if I'd like it back. From the very first story, I began slyly falling back in love with Ms. McCullers. By the time I'd reached The Member of the Wedding my passion had reached a fever pitch. There I was in the South, sweating hot in a cabin in the woods, and I could not pull myself away from her words. It was as if she were sprawled out on the plank floor next to me, tall and haunted, whispering these stories in my burning ear.

Coming-of-age tales remain among my favorite types of literature. In the past, I devoured them with insatiable hunger. But never in all my reading have I seen the loss of childhood described with such painstaking devastation as in The Member of the Wedding. McCullers lays out F. Jasmine's agonies before the reader in exquisite detail, many of them poured forth in molasses-stretched moments as F. Jasmine huddles around the kitchen table in the fading twilight with her cohorts Berenice and John Henry, both of whom she loves and loathes, in that special moody way of early adolescence.

Reading The Member of the Wedding made me physically ill at some points. It was as if I were reliving the shattering of my own youthful innocence under the merciless hammers we never see coming when we are young. The excruciation burned particularly hard while watching in my mind as F. Jasmine walked through the Blue Moon upstairs to that room. With my faith in humanity as it is, always resting on a twitchy teeter-totter, wavering between none and some, this scene slammed down hard on the none side, sending the hard wooden plank rushing up to collide with my chin. As I rubbed my throbbing jaw, I thought about how hard it is to grow up in this world, to remain unmarred by some flawed adult's selfish motives.

Though McCullers drags F. Jasmine through tragic circles, she leaves her in a tentative upswing at the end. This surprised me a little, and yet when I think about the last passages, I see more heartbreak and frustration ahead for her. For though she weathered a few brutal storms, she still lives very much in her own head. And I know what trouble that can bring, far into the years to come. ( )