Most Popular Books by William Faulkner

“I’m a failed poet. Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can’t and then tries the short story which is the most demanding form after poetry. And failing that, only then does he take up novel writing.” —William Faulkner Winner of the National Book Award Forty-two stories make up this magisterial collection by the writer who stands at the pinnacle of modern American fiction. Compressing an epic expanse of vision into hard and wounding narratives, Faulkner’s stories evoke the intimate textures of place, the deep strata of history and legend, and all the fear, brutality, and tenderness of the human condition. These tales are set not only in Yoknapatawpha County, but in Beverly Hills and in France during World War I. They are populated by such characters as the Faulknerian archetypes Flem Snopes and Quentin Compson, as well as by ordinary men and women who emerge so sharply and indelibly in these pages that they dwarf the protagonists of most novels.

This grand misadventure is the story of three unlikely thieves, or reivers: 11-year-old Lucius Priest and two of his family''s retainers. In 1905, these three set out from Mississippi for Memphis in a stolen motorcar. The astonishing and complicated results reveal Faulkner as a master of the picaresque. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

A Fable tells the story of Corporal Stephen, an allegorical figure whose traitorous actions stop, briefly, fighting in a small part of the front in France during the First World War. Told from various perspectives, A Fable explores the humanity of war and the nature of power. Author William Faulkner considered A Fable to be his masterpiece, and laboured more than a decade on the manuscript. The novel won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and is now considered one of the major works in Faulkner’s canon. HarperPerennial Classics brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in ebook production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperPerennial Classics collection to build your digital library.

From the Nobel Prize winner—one of the most highly acclaimed writers of the twentieth century—a novel set in the American South during Prohibition about hopeful perseverance in the face of mortality. Light in August features some of Faulkner’s most memorable characters: guileless, dauntless Lena Grove, in search of the father of her unborn child; Reverend Gail Hightower, who is plagued by visions of Confederate horsemen; and Joe Christmas, a desperate, enigmatic drifter consumed by his mixed ancestry. “Read, read, read. Read everything—trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out the window.” —William Faulkner

This invaluable volume, which has been republished to commemorate the one-hundredth anniversary of Faulkner''s birth, contains some of the greatest short fiction by a writer who defined the course of American literature. Its forty-five stories fall into three categories: those not included in Faulkner''s earlier collections; previously unpublished short fiction; and stories that were later expanded into such novels as The Unvanquished, The Hamlet, and Go Down, Moses. With its Introduction and extensive notes by the biographer Joseph Blotner, Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner is an essential addition to its author''s canon--as well as a book of some of the most haunting, harrowing, and atmospheric short fiction written in the twentieth century.

Grief-stricken World War I veteran takes his own life after his son is born.

The Sound and the Fury is one of William Faulkner’s most celebrated novels, and a landmark of American literature. Famous for its non-chronological structure and experimental style, the novel focuses on the once-prominent Compson family, descendants of planter aristocrats who have declined in both social standing and material wealth. As white landowners in the fictional county of Yoknapatawpha in Mississippi, they continue to employ an African-American family to serve them. Each of the Compson parents has withdrawn from responsibility for their children, so the matriarch of the servant family, Dilsey, effectively raises their three sons and daughter. Each of the four parts of the novel is told from a different point of view, with each of the first three sections narrated by a different Compson son. In the first chapter, set on the day before Easter Sunday in 1928, the narrator is the mentally disabled thirty-three-year-old Benjy. The second chapter enters the mind of troubled Harvard student Quentin, who is finishing his year at the university. The third chapter, set on Good Friday, 1928, is narrated by the callous and mercenary brother Jason, who now works as a clerk at a farming supply store; and finally, on Easter Sunday 1928, the perspective is that of an omniscient narrator, though the main character of the section emerges as Dilsey. Central to each of the sons’ sections is their sister Caddy, whose rebellion as a young woman brings pain upon Benjy, profoundly disturbs Quentin, enrages Jason, and accelerates the family’s already precipitous decline. The book is noted for its nonlinearity, not only in the order of its four narratives but in the sequences of events recorded within the first two of them: Faulkner makes heavy use of a “stream-of-consciousness” style to relate Benjy’s and Quentin’s memories and thoughts, which jump around temporally. Non-standard italics and punctuation contribute to the effect. The influence of James Joyce upon the first two narratives was immediately identified by contemporary critics, though Edward Crickmay labeled the book “an even tougher proposition for the general novel reader than Ulysses.” Despite this compliment, its initial reception was mixed in general; it was described as inaccessible, even “unreadable.” At the same time, it was acknowledged for its innovative development of the stream-of-consciousness technique, and for its attentive depiction of the postbellum American South, in particular the decay of its formerly slavery-based aristocracy and the value system of that class. The Sound and the Fury was Faulkner’s fourth novel, written after a lengthy struggle to have his third novel published. He later wrote that the novel arose from a single image, that of the character Caddy climbing a tree as a small child; and that the entirety of the story is present in the first narrative, with the following three having been written to clarify it. In 1945 Faulkner wrote an appendix that both explained and extended the novel, describing the fates of some of the characters; while quickly seen to introduce plot inconsistencies, it’s still often reprinted with the novel. The Compsons’ “tale full of sound and fury” both illustrates a particular historical context and explores more widely relevant themes. The novel’s title, taken from a famous speech in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, points to a central concern with time. The book depicts the march of change in the mores of the American South over the first three decades of the twentieth century, but also the possibility, not limited to that setting, of a family’s disintegration over generations, and the consequences of various distinct responses—notably despair, rage, flight, and resignation—to rotten domestic and social environments. A tragedy of idiocy, memory, and the “dusty death” of an era, The Sound and the Fury signified nothing less than a turning point in American literary history and modernism. This book is part of the Standard Ebooks project, which produces free public domain ebooks.

NOBEL PRIZE WINNER • Family drama and the legacy of slavery haunt this epic tale of an enigmatic stranger in Jefferson, Mississippi—from one of the most acclaimed writers of the twentieth century. One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years “Read, read, read. Read everything—trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out the window.” —William Faulkner Absalom, Absalom! is Faulkner’s epic tale of Thomas Sutpen, a man who comes to the South in the early 1830s to wrest his mansion out of the muddy bottoms of the north Mississippi wilderness. He was a man, Faulkner said, “who wanted sons and the sons destroyed him.”

A true 20th-century classic from the Nobel Prize-winning author of The Sound and the Fury: the famed harrowing account of the Bundren family’s odyssey across the Mississippi countryside to bury Addie, their wife and mother. As I Lay Dying is one of the most influential novels in American fiction in structure, style, and drama. Narrated in turn by each of the family members, including Addie herself as well as others, the novel ranges in mood from dark comedy to the deepest pathos. “I set out deliberately to write a tour-de-force. Before I ever put pen to paper and set down the first word I knew what the last word would be and almost where the last period would fall.” —William Faulkner on As I Lay Dying This edition reproduces the corrected text of As I Lay Dying as established in 1985 by Noel Polk.

Brutal novel of the Deep South by the Nobel prize winner.

A classic Faulkner novel which explores the lives of a family of characters in the South. An aging black who has long refused to adopt the black''s traditionally servile attitude is wrongfully accused of murdering a white man.

Analytische annotatie: Liefdesgedichten

Capturing the post–World War I atmosphere of the Lost Generation on American soil, William Faulkner explores the war’s emotional impact on three weary veterans and their Southern hometown in Georgia.

“I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.” —William Faulkner, on receiving the Nobel Prize Go Down, Moses is composed of seven interrelated stories, all of them set in Faulkner’s mythic Yoknapatawpha County. From a variety of perspectives, Faulkner examines the complex, changing relationships between blacks and whites, between man and nature, weaving a cohesive novel rich in implication and insight.

In this feverishly beautiful novel—originally titled If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem—William Faulkner interweaves two narratives, each wholly absorbing in its own right, each subtly illuminating the other. In New Orleans in 1937, a man and a woman embark on a headlong flight into the wilderness of illicit passion, fleeing her husband and the temptations of respectability. In Mississippi ten years earlier, a convict sets forth across a flooded river, risking his own chance at freedom to rescue a pregnant woman. From these separate stories Faulkner composes a symphony of deliverance and damnation, survival and self-sacrifice, a novel in which elemental danger is juxtaposed with fatal injuries of the spirit. The Wild Palms is grandly inventive, heart-stopping in its prose, and suffused on every page with the physical presence of the country that Faulkner made his own.