The Member of the Wedding (Penguin Modern Classics) - Softcover

McCullers, Carson

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0141182822 ISBN 13: 9780141182827

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 2001

Synopsis

'Rarely has emotional turbulence been so delicately conveyed' The New York Times

With delicacy of perception and memory, humour and pathos, Carson McCullers spreads before us the three phases of a weekend crisis in the life of a motherless twelve-year-old girl. Within the span of a few hours, the irresistible, hoydenish Frankie passionately plays out her fantasies at her elder brother's wedding. Through a perilous skylight we look into the mind of a child torn between her yearning to belong and the urge to run away.

About this title

Review:

Entirely winning ... A probing novel about a youngster with an unlimited gift for creating fantasies in a Southern town ... Rarely has emotional turbulence been so delicately conveyed (The New York Times)

The greatest prose writer that the South produced ... She has examined the heart of man with an understanding that no other writer can hope to surpass (Tennessee Williams)

Of all the Southern writers, she is the most apt to endure (Gore Vidal)

About the Author:

Carson McCullers (Author)
Carson McCullers was born in 1917. She is the critically acclaimed author of several popular novels in the 1940s and '50s, including The Member of the Wedding (1946). Her novels frequently depicted life in small towns of the southeastern United States and were marked by themes of loneliness and spiritual isolation. McCullers suffered from ill health most of her adult life, including a series of strokes that began when she was in her 20s; she died at the age of 50. The Member of the Wedding was dramatized for the stage in the 1950s and filmed in 1952 and 1997. Other films based on her books are Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967, with Elizabeth Taylor and Marlon Brando), The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1968, starring Alan Arkin) and The Ballad of the Sad Café (1991).

Ali Smith (Introducer)
Ali Smith was born in Inverness in 1962. She is the author of Free Love and Other Stories, Like, Other Stories and Other Stories, Hotel World, The Whole Story and Other Stories, The Accidental, Girl Meets Boy, The First Person and Other Stories, There but for the, Artful, How to be both, and Public library and other stories. Hotel World was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Orange Prize and The Accidental was shortlisted for the Man Booker and the Orange Prize. How to be both won the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, the Goldsmiths Prize and the Costa Novel Award and was shortlisted for the Man Booker and the Folio Prize. Ali Smith lives in Cambridge and her next novel, Autumn, is forthcoming in the second half of 2016.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0141182822
• ISBN 13: 9780141182827
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224