What do you think?
Rate this book
The Cry of An Occasion: Fiction from the Fellowship of Southern Writers
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 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 surprise 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 assistance in 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.
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 surprise 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 assistance in 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.
224 pages, Hardcover
First published April 1, 2001
1 person is currently reading
11 people want to read
About the author
Richard Bausch
92 books217 followersAn acknowledged master of the short story form, Richard Bausch's work has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, Harper's, The New Yorker, Narrative, Gentleman's Quarterly. Playboy, The Southern Review, New Stories From the South, The Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories, and The Pushcart Prize Stories; and they have been widely anthologized, including The Granta Book of the American Short Story and The Vintage Book of the Contemporary American Short Story.
Richard Bausch is the author of eleven novels and eight collections of stories, including the novels Rebel Powers, Violence, Good Evening Mr. & Mrs. America And All The Ships At Sea, In The Night Season, Hello To The Cannibals, Thanksgiving Night, and Peace; and the story collections Spirits, The Fireman's Wife, Rare & Endangered Species, Someone To Watch Over Me, The Stories of Richard Bausch, Wives & Lovers, and most recently released Something Is Out There. His novel The Last Good Time was made into a feature-length film.
He has won two National Magazine Awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lila-Wallace Reader's Digest Fund Writer's Award, the Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, The 2004 PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story and the 2013 John William Corrington Award for Literary Excellence . He has been a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers since 1996. In 1999 he signed on as co-editor, with RV Cassill, of The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction; since Cassill's passing in 2002, Bausch is the sole editor of that prestigious anthology. Richard Bausch teaches Creative Writing at Chapman University in Southern California
Richard Bausch is the author of eleven novels and eight collections of stories, including the novels Rebel Powers, Violence, Good Evening Mr. & Mrs. America And All The Ships At Sea, In The Night Season, Hello To The Cannibals, Thanksgiving Night, and Peace; and the story collections Spirits, The Fireman's Wife, Rare & Endangered Species, Someone To Watch Over Me, The Stories of Richard Bausch, Wives & Lovers, and most recently released Something Is Out There. His novel The Last Good Time was made into a feature-length film.
He has won two National Magazine Awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lila-Wallace Reader's Digest Fund Writer's Award, the Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, The 2004 PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story and the 2013 John William Corrington Award for Literary Excellence . He has been a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers since 1996. In 1999 he signed on as co-editor, with RV Cassill, of The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction; since Cassill's passing in 2002, Bausch is the sole editor of that prestigious anthology. Richard Bausch teaches Creative Writing at Chapman University in Southern California
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
February 20, 2020
The Cry of an Occasion does as its title aptly implies by presenting stories that resonate with some form of a cry, be in haunting or joyous; these stories evoke a response to an occasion. In the first story, Madison Smartt Bell's "The Naked Lady," there are cries of lost love, cries of watching an artist believe his naked lady sculpture is real, cries of seeing a friend come home from college changed.
Michael Knight's "For Alice to the Fourth Floor" is a painfully honest story about a single mother becoming drunk on the first date and being locked out of her apartment on a frigid night in December. Though her friend would rather be home, and knows it would be easier to simply take Alice home with him, he goes through much difficulty to return her safely to her own apartment. When Custer finally gets into her apartment, he "crossed the room, dodging furniture, that momentary vision of her apartment fixed in his head. Something happened tonight, he thought, but, for the longest time, he wouldn't be able to put his finger on what it was," and neither will the reader, but somehow we'll feel that same discomfort.
Throughout this collection, there are occasions of family reunions (William Henry Lewis' "Germinating") and the cries of discovering unknown truths about relatives; learning one is pregnant (Jill McCorkle's "Life Prerecorded"), and her sudden craving for cigarettes, then experiencing endless dreams of horrible births; and a father's grief over his teenaged son who committed suicide (Lewis Nordan's "Tombstone"); and the strange turn of events when a teenaged girl attends her grandmother's funeral (Walter Sullivan's "Losses"), then meets a handsome gravedigger, and sneaks away with him for a few beers, returning from this encounter with an even more profound sense of loss.
Just this past year I moved to Arkansas, and reading this collection from Southern writers has provided me with a greater sense of place, a deeper understanding of the rootedness to family, the intense connection to the familiar, and the longing for something else.
Michael Knight's "For Alice to the Fourth Floor" is a painfully honest story about a single mother becoming drunk on the first date and being locked out of her apartment on a frigid night in December. Though her friend would rather be home, and knows it would be easier to simply take Alice home with him, he goes through much difficulty to return her safely to her own apartment. When Custer finally gets into her apartment, he "crossed the room, dodging furniture, that momentary vision of her apartment fixed in his head. Something happened tonight, he thought, but, for the longest time, he wouldn't be able to put his finger on what it was," and neither will the reader, but somehow we'll feel that same discomfort.
Throughout this collection, there are occasions of family reunions (William Henry Lewis' "Germinating") and the cries of discovering unknown truths about relatives; learning one is pregnant (Jill McCorkle's "Life Prerecorded"), and her sudden craving for cigarettes, then experiencing endless dreams of horrible births; and a father's grief over his teenaged son who committed suicide (Lewis Nordan's "Tombstone"); and the strange turn of events when a teenaged girl attends her grandmother's funeral (Walter Sullivan's "Losses"), then meets a handsome gravedigger, and sneaks away with him for a few beers, returning from this encounter with an even more profound sense of loss.
Just this past year I moved to Arkansas, and reading this collection from Southern writers has provided me with a greater sense of place, a deeper understanding of the rootedness to family, the intense connection to the familiar, and the longing for something else.
August 12, 2014
Excellent collection of stories, both open-ended and closed-ended.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews