The Grass Harp is a beautiful story of how people play their roles in family and community. How we hurt those we love and find what is missing in our lives and weigh what is more important to us. The other short stories are rather dark. This is where I lowered my rating because some just left you unsatisfied and felt incomplete. Others were poignant.

This book includes the novella The Grass Harp and eight stories. They are listed below with a short description and some quotes from each. At the end I speak of the book as a whole and the audiobook performance.

The Grass Harp—about an orphan and two elderly women friends, one White and the other a mixed Indian and Black. They flee to a house hidden in a china tree. Set in a small southern town.
Quote: “Love is a chain of love, because if you love one thing you can love another.”

Master Misery—about a girl and a clown and a man who buys dreams. Set in NYC.
Quote: “Happiness winged around her like a bird lamed, but flying around her.”

Children on Their Birthdays--about an obnoxious little girl, Miss Bobbitt, in her pretty yellow frock. She moves into town with her mother, meets some kids and gets run over by the 6 o’clock bus. This about the bus, we are told at the start. Set again in a small southern town.
Quote: “Friends, like ivy on the wall, must fall.”

Shut a Final Door--about making your way among the chic and the advertising world of NYC. This is well done, but not a pleasant reading experience!
Quotes: “What is the use of having friends if you couldn’t discuss them objectively.”
and
"On the way out, he paid for a cup of coffee he had forgotten to have.”

Jug of Silver--In a small southern town there is a drugstore with its soda fountain counter. Into town moves a competitor. How are the clientele to be won back? This story, set at Christmas, I did enjoy.
Quote: “You oughtn’t to be telling our personal, private family business that a’way, Appleseed.”

Miriam--about two Miriams, a little girl and a widow. They meet at a movie theater in wintry NYC. This story grabbed my interest from the start and held it to the end. THIS story is very good!
Quotes: “The line seemed to be taking its own time, and looking around for some distraction, she suddenly became conscious of a little girl standing under the edge of the marquis. Her hair was…….”
and
(That's an) “imitation. Aren’t imitations sad?”

The Headless Hawk--about a girl in green and a guy working in an art studio. He buys her painting, but he buys it for himself! Look at the title and the last quote and then stop and think. This story attracted me at the start, but the end threw me. Another story set in NYC.
Quotes: “Her eyes rolled in her sockets like loose marbles…she looked like a sad rag doll…..and (he) wondered why it was that eccentricity always excited in him such a curious admiration. It was the feeling he’d had toward carnival freaks.”
and
“Candles are magic. Light one and the world becomes a storybook.”
and
“He was, he said, a poet who had never written poetry, a painter who had never painted, a lover who had never loved absolutely. Someone, in short, without direction and quite headless.”

My Side of the Matter--about Miss Olivia Ann, Eunice, Blue Bell, Marge and Baby Doll. The last is a man, if I have understood correctly. Set in the South, it is a disjointed telling of a confrontation, a fracas, a melee.
Quotes: “No wife of mine is ever gonna be disrespectful of me.”
and
“That was my funeral money, and I want it back.”

A Tree of Night is set in a train in Alabama headed toward Atlanta. It is about a nineteen-year-old girl traveling from her uncle’s funeral back to college and the creepy couple she meets in the train coach. You could call them a traveling circus show of two.
Quotes: “He think I’m drunk, and the funny part is I am. You gotta do something.”
and
“Didn’t your mamma ever tell you it is sinful to lie?!”

The prose is filled with abstract metaphors and fanciful impressions. They seem to me to be saying more than I understand. The writing feels somehow psychedelic. Few of the stories engaged me, and none of the characters pulled me in. The reading experience left me detached. On the other hand, Truman Capote is adept at capturing the feel of a time and place, be it NYC, the world of advertising or a small town in the South. His prose intrigues me, which explains why I have given quotes.

The audiobook sold at Audible is entitled The Grass Harp, but the stories are also included. Cody Roberts narrates the audiobook. He uses a thick southern dialect when he reads the novella. When he is using a southern accent, he tends to almost sing the lines. Pauses are often misplaced. He stops both before and after the word “and”. Why he does this is beyond me! I did not like his narration of the novella, but he reads the stories better, so I have given the narration three stars.

The novella, the next two stories and the last two did little for me. Only one story, Miriam, did I like a lot, three stories were good or pretty good, so I guess the book was OK.

************************

In Cold Blood 4 stars
Breakfast at Tiffany's 4 stars
The Grass Harp, Including A Tree of Night and Other Stories 2 stars
Other Voices, Other Rooms TBR

This was my first Capote. I loved his writing. Now I definitely want to read more. I especially treasured "The Grass Harp" story, as well as the story of Miss Bobbitt. The Grass Harp definitely took the cake for me, though. He is so wonderful at very quickly creating a whole, full, living world right in front of you, in a matter of paragraphs.

I love the way Truman Capote writes. I love his vivid language, flamboyant characters, rhythmic sentences and bold, fantastic scenes.
Reading Truman Capote is like eating cheesecake -- every sentence is rich and glorious. Here's a beautiful excerpt from The Grass Harp:
Wind surprised, pealed the leaves, parted night clouds; showers of starlight were let loose: our candle, as though intimidated by the incandescence of the the opening, star-stabbed sky, toppled, and we could see, unwrapped above us, a late wayaway wintery moon: it was like a slice of snow, near and far creatures called to it, hunched moon-eyed frogs, a claw-voiced wildcat.
At its core, The Grass Harp is about love. The Judge says of love, "A leaf, a handful of seed -- begin with these, learn a little of what it is to love. First, a leaf, a fall of rain, then someone to receive what a leaf has taught you, what a fall of rain has ripened. No easy process, understand: it could take a lifetime, it has mine, and still I've never mastered it -- I only know how true it is: that love is a chain of love, as nature is a chain of life."
Dolly elaborates on this thought in the final pages of the book in a conversation with Collin:
"Charlie said that love is a chain of love. I hope you listened and understood him. Because when you can love one thing...., you can love another, and that is owning, that is something to live with. You can forgive everything."
The treehouse scenes create the turning point of the book. There we have a collection of "fools" each trying to find out who he/she truly is. It is after the Judge leaves the treehouse that he has the courage to leave his sons and set off on his own. Similarly with Riley Henderson, it is after he leaves the tree house that he falls in love with Maude Riordan, gets engaged, and finds purpose as he begins to clear land with a plan to build houses.
Verena, unfortunately, never has a treehouse epiphany although Dolly forces her into the tree presumably with the hope of redeeming her sister (or herself, maybe both). The reader realizes that Verena has allowed the longstanding unacknowledged or perhaps unreciprocated love she held for Maudie Laura Murphy to destroy her life. In other words, she permitted the chain of love to be broken. Dolly, on the other hand, has kept the chain of love intact and although she leaves the treehouse to return to her sister, one gets the impression she is triumphant and not a coward.
A beautiful book.

"... in this kind of work one is able to identify something which has until that instant seemed a private inexpressible perception, and you wonder: who is this that knows me, and how?"

"Flying around inside us is something called the Soul, and when you die you're never dead; yes, and when we're alive we're never alive. And so you want to know if I love you? Don't be dumb, Walter, we're not even friends..."

"... ah, the energy we spend hiding from one another, afraid as we are of being identified. But here we are, identified: five fools in a tree."

"So little, once it has changed, changes back: the world knew us: we would never be warm again: I let go, saw winter coming toward a cold tree, cried, cried, came apart like a rain-rotted rag."

"We took nothing with us: left the quilt to rot, spoons to rust; and the tree-house, the woods we left to winter."

The Grass Harp (the reason I got this book, not realizing it was a collection of short stories), is a historic narrative featuring a teenage boy named Colin who is adopted by some older ladies. One offends the other by asking for her secret recipe for an herbal treatment, so most of the household leaves to go camp out in a tree house. This causes a crazy uproar. Things are stolen. People are shot. Homeless kids frolic in the stream. Colin considers his romantic prospects. And in the meantime, we consider what it means to find someone you really belong with.

There are other stories in this book, but if you want a summary of those, you'll have to look elsewhere. Suffice to say that most are pretty tragic but still thought provoking. Which describes Grass Harp, incidentally. The language is beautiful, and there's a thoughtful message hidden in the chaos. I can also appreciate that the characters feel like real people doing just the sorts of ridiculous things that real people do. This book has some dated language and isn't as sensitive to race as I'd expect of a more recent book, but that's fine as long as you remember that it's a product of its time. I mostly took some stars away because I was confused a lot and not really excited to finish the book, but I can admit that the writing is well done. I just don't know about the plot.

A good collection of a novella and short stories. The Grass Harp is about a young boy who is orphaned and goes to live with two older aunts and spends some time with one of them in a tree house. Of the short stories my favorites were A Tree of Night in which a young nineteen year old girl boards a train and sits next to a very creepy older couple and Children on Their Birthdays about a strange little girl who is run over by a bus. Capote stories are all character driven (and he definitely can create some great characters) and the interaction between those characters. He also uses very clever descriptive prose.

The Grass Harp is a lifetime of love and loss, a melancholic remembrance of what was and what could have been. It commands us to cherish our loved ones and not be cross with the people around us.
While only being a smidge over 100 pages, this story proved to be a slow read. The Grass Harp is set in a small town and the pages and the words on them reflect this. The short story flashes through Collin’s life, yet it feels as if you are there living through it all with him.
This story made me want to go tell all of my friends and family I love them and that no matter their actions towards me they will always be the people I want to be around.
The Grass Harp emphasized the sacredness love, and how you should cherish every moment you get to spend with the people you care about.

Capote's prose is pure poetry the way he uses is language is far, far superior to the plot line itself. It is mystical and magical, much like the lives of his characters who are either so much removed from the humdrum of "real" life that they live in a "better" if not realistic place where only children and the childlike of any age can understand.

The Grass Harp is a wonderful story.
The other stories in the book have a variety of themes, some of which I enjoyed more than others, but I am impressed with the quality of Capote's writing in all of them.

Grass harp is probably the best story in the book. Capote writes the most outrageous characters in the most strangest of circumstances. He writes about normal people in normal backdrop but the descriptions seem to be so surreal. A common theme in these stories is the weak baseness of the characters. The protagonist is of such timid nature makes you wonder how are they even standing without a backbrace and crutches. The stories start abruptly and the endings are no better. Some stories were nothing short of disturbing. This is my first time reading Capote which is why I find his writing a little strange.

After slogging through The Grass Harp, I didn’t continue the other short stories. This one I found to be too long for a short story and too short for a novella. A farce about 2 older sisters who adopt the narrator, Collin and a black woman who claims she is an Indian. I found the writing mediocre at best. The story focuses on the lack of character in the characters. I find no redeeming qualities except that I got through it.