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Bonnie Jo Campbell is a former National Book Award finalist and author of the novels "Once Upon a River" and "The Waters." "The Waters," about a girl who grows up off the grid in rural Michigan, has just become available in paperback.
'The Ballad of the Sad Café' by Carson McCullers (1951)
In this modern fairy tale, McCullers creates the perfect love triangle: Miss Amelia the bootlegger, her ex-convict ex-husband, and the trickster Cousin Lymon. McCullers explores how love can liberate a community and how easily that freedom and joy can slip away. Buy it here.
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This is the ultimate dysfunctional family story, about a circus troupe whose members abhor normalcy to such a degree that the parents intentionally breed a family of sideshow freaks. It's a literary version of the superhero universe, in which people's abnormalities make them magnificent. And sometimes terrible. Buy it here.
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These essays are funny, infuriating, resonant, giving us insight into the limitations under which Woolf labored while creating her lyrical novels. We lament how even today the culture can still be suspicious or dismissive of women's creativity, of the heroine's journey as different, separate, from the hero's. Buy it here.
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