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Many of Carson McCullers' notable works are compiled in a single volume titled The Collected Stories of Carson McCullers, Including The Member of the Wedding and The Ballad of the Sad Cafe. This collection was most recently reissued by Mariner Books in 1998.
Truman Capote, a friend of McCullers, created characters that often seem as though they could belong in her stories. One of his collections that closely resembles McCullers' style is The Grass Harp, which was reissued by Vintage Books in 1993. This volume also includes his well-known novella A Tree of Night.
Flannery O’Connor once remarked, “I have found that anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the Northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.” O’Connor, like McCullers, was a Southern woman writer who lived in the 1950s and 1960s, faced illness for much of her life, and died young. Her novels are compelling, but her most refined work is found in her short stories, which are gathered in The Collected Stories of Flannery O’Connor.
The town depicted in this book bears a resemblance to the Southern towns portrayed in the writings of William Faulkner, a Mississippi author from the generation preceding McCullers. Its fragmented narrative style, shifting focus from one character to another, is similar to one of Faulkner’s renowned works, The Sound and the Fury, published in 1939.
Sherwood Anderson originally titled his 1919 book Winesburg, Ohio as The Book of Grotesques. Like McCullers’ work, it examines various characters within a town who sometimes interact and sometimes do not, all possessing distinct and exaggerated traits that influence their existence in their world.
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