A pricey pleasure for readers of southern fiction: 19 stories from
the Fellowship of Southern Writers showcasing a variety of talents
and styles that rarely fail to engage the reader's appetite for
rich tales well-told. The expected concerns are all on display
here: race relations, regional history, death, and that sturdy
southern interest, women's lot (five of the contributors are
female). Shelby Foote, a peerless historian of the Civil War,
provides a wonderful 18th-century tale, "The Sacred Mound," about
Native American struggle and spirituality. In "Tombstone," Lewis
Nordon sketches a transplanted southerner's curious obsession with
a native tombstone. Jill McCorkle's "Life Prerecorded" delivers a
splendid, journal-style account of a woman's pregnancy and
subsequent motherhood. And in one of the strongest selections,
Allan Gurganus offers a pair of letters informing a mother of her
son's death in the Civil War - one by the son himself. Throughout,
there is very little distracting irony, and authorial mannerisms
are rarely intrusive; if it is too much to say these are earnest
stories, they are for sure earnestly written, with a refreshing
purposefulness about them. Even as Madison Smartt Bell starts the
collection off in familiar territory - a man awakens hung over in
his seedy apartment to shoot at a bedside rat - such moments, in
their fluent, easy telling, hardly seem gimmicky..A strong
collection from a gathering of accomplished writers who have more
than their style to show.. (Kirkus Reviews)
To drink deep of the direction and sensibility of contemporary
southern fiction, savor each dram in this delectable volume.
Nineteen of the South's most venerable writers -- Madison Smartt
Bell, Doris Betts, Fred Chappell, Ellen Douglas, Shelby Foote,
George Garrett, Allan Gurganus, Barry Hannah, William Hoffman,
Madison Jones, Michael Knight, William Henry Lewis, Jill McCorkle,
Lewis Nordan, Louis D. Rubin, Jr., Lee Smith, Elizabeth Spencer,
Walter Sullivan, and Allen Wier -- have selected a short work for
inclusion here. All of the contributors are affiliated with the the
Fellowship of Southern Writers, organized in 1989 under the
inspiration of the late Cleanth Brooks for the purpose of
encouraging and honoring excellence in southern letters.
Each piece in The Cry of an Occasion celebrates the distinctness
of southern experience, giving expression in story form to a
singular episode of mind, heart, or will. Varying from whimsical to
ominous to sidesplitting to melancholy, the stories share a regard
for the people who brush against us and in so doing shape us --
generations of family especially, neighbors, as well as those
occasional individuals who can mysteriously yet profoundly affect
our lives.
On a freezing December night, a woman returning home from a
first date with a man finds herself locked out of her apartment;
the pains he takes to help her surprises them both. A teenage girl
suffers the day of her grandmother's funeral attempting to be
adult, furious with the pessimism of her mother and wounded by the
absence of her father since she was three. A slave fleeing
Mississippi in 1862 draws on the wisdom of breaking horses passed
down from his grandfather to win assistancein his flight for
freedom. Fourteen years after his teenage son's death, a man
realizes his mourning is incomplete despite therapy, relocation,
and the outward signs of contentment. A pregnant woman has vivid
dreams -- of giving birth to a kitten, of forgetting her baby on
the hood of her car, and of concealing a joint in her bra -- as she
watches Boston's changing seasons and struggles with her torturous
enjoyment of smoking.
"Now where will it all end?" asks one character. "All this pain
and loving, mystery and loss. And it just goes on and on". The
occasion and expression of southern fiction are in hale and hardy
form, and reading this exemplary collection is pure pleasure.
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