The Southern Reporter and Other Stories - Tapa dura

The past isn't dead. It isn't even the past," William Faulker wrote.The Southern Reporter constitutes a report on the collisions between a present that cannot find its voice and a past that reaches out incessantly into the lives of contemporary men and women.

An old Louisiana lawyer finds himself in California seeking a missing heir who is a physicist, musician, doctor, theologian-and a leader of a crazed and murderous santanistic cult.

A childless retired couple prepares treats for Halloween's children-only to find that the "children" have taken on the character of their terrifying costumes.

An elderly lawyer, dying of cancer, is forced to recall an even greater pain and finds his own kind of salvation in the remembrance of love.

A court reporter, who has spent his life recording the crimes and affairs of others, at last cannot stand the flood of evil and visits his own justice on a man the jury has found innocent of rape.

A young boy is caught between his high-spirited, hell-raising uncle and the deadly civilizing force of his mother.

The Southern Reporter penetrates the façade of contemporary life, looking for its roots in the past -- not simply the past of its people but the looming imaginary structure of western history, against which all of us lead our lives -- and die our deaths. The search for images of order and the loss of them constitute the meaning of The Southern Reporter.

John William Corrington is a lawyer, political philosopher, and writer who holds degrees from Centenary, Rice, Sussex, and Tulane. He has published two previous collections of stories, The Lonesome Traveller and Other Stories, and The Actes and Monuments. His stories have been reprinted in The Best American Short Stories, 1972, 1976, 1977, and in the O. Henry Awards Collection for 1976. In 1967 he won a National Endowment for the Arts Award for short fiction. Corrington has published four collections of poetry, Where We Are, The Anatomy of Love, Mr. Clean and Other Poems, Five Lives to the South; three novels, And Wait For the Night, The Upper Hand, and The Bombardier. With Joyce H. Corrington, he has written a number of screen plays, including The Omega Man, Boxcar Bertha, Battle for the Planet of the Apes, and The Killer Bees. He has written a number of articles in political theory and criticism and is currently head writer, with Joyce H. Corrington, of the new television series, Texas.