I read this book when researching a paper I was writing on Faulkner's "Absalom, Absalom!" and it was excellent. The particular paper I was writing was on the character of Jim Bond, but I really wish I had found it earlier when I wrote one on "miscegenation" -- the racist concept of "mixed blood" in "Absalom, Absalom!". It was precise, interesting and well-researched. It is particularly helpful for anyone doing research on William Faulkner's works specifically related to people of color. It focuses on the Sutpen family, but I think there's useful information that can also be related to other works.

I'll admit straight off the bat that I'm not a huge fan of stream-of-consciousness narratives. In fact, I dislike such styles more often than I enjoy them. ABSALOM, ABSALOM! was also the first work by William Faulkner that I have ever read, which (judging by the reviews on this site) is apparently not the best place I could have started. Yet despite these potential problems, I quite enjoyed the overall book. There were several places where I found the narrative voice to be quite tedious, but the story was so captivating that these difficulties were well worth struggling through.

As I said, I don't usually like the stream-of-consciousness style of writing. When done incorrectly, it can lead to books full of hopelessly incoherent rambling that is neither insightful nor interesting. However, in the case of ABSALOM, ABSALOM!, I'll grudgingly admit that the style does help the story quite a bit. Some of the asides and passages were extremely effective at conveying the atmosphere of the South during the Civil War. The various misconceptions that several characters have (the reader can only gradually piece together the truth) are perfectly true to their personalities and reveal more about the people in this story than the actual events would have. That said, some of the more esoteric portions of the text had me nearly throwing the book across the room in angry confusion. Fortunately for the sake of my library, my walls and my sanity, those more obscure sections are not terribly numerous, and many of them can become penetrable, albeit after the second or third reading.

One of the aspects of the novel I most appreciated was Faulkner's ability to set my expectations in one direction, and then completely pull the rug out from under me. There were several major twists and turns that I genuinely did not anticipate. Characters' understandings are fallible, and yet whenever something that someone had said turned out to be false, I never felt cheated. While a lot of the narrative shocks stem from people misunderstanding events from long ago, the mistakes they make are perfectly valid, and I never once felt that Faulkner had deliberately caused people to misconstrue happenings merely to drive the plot.

Racism plays a major part in this story, so be prepared to see some language and activities that aren't politically correct. Faulkner is showing racism for exactly what it was at the time, an everyday fact of life, and a concept that was applied randomly and irrationally. He doesn't compromise, but neither does he dwell on this subject. He records it exactly as he saw it, from a perspective that none of his characters have the benefit of sharing.

Despite my own apprehension upon reading the first few pages, I ended up quite enjoying ABSALOM, ABSALOM!. It took me a couple of chapters before I got into the rhythm of the prose, but once it clicked in my head I was able to read it with very little problem. If the text looks intimidating at first, I advise you to attempt it anyway to see if you can't wrap your head around it. I managed to make myself understand it, and I am very glad that I didn't simply give up before the end. The symbolism, the tragedy, and the bare emotions - they all contribute to making this a fantastic story. The way that Faulkner manages to portray hopes, dreams, heartbreak, blind ambition, and hubris in a manner than somehow all manages to be perfectly believable is a huge achievement, and something well worth the time it takes to read.

I once attended a lecture by a Famous Contemporary American Writer who, among other things, bemoaned the fact that there was no "great American epic" on the Civil War.

Well, sir - this is it, and in my humble opinion the finest output of America's greatest writer (which makes it the great American novel, in my humble opinion.) It wasn't the book closest to Faulkner's heart - that was "The Sound and the Fury" - but Absalom, Absalom! has the lurid, desperate power of a fever dream that manages to tell the story of the Southern States before the War, the Confederacy, slavery and "race relations" all in 300 or so pages. Even after having read the book twelve or so times I gawk with amazement at the ease with which Faulkner switches voices and point of views between Quentin Compson at Harvard in the 1910s, Mississippi before, during, and after the War. Some might find them sudden and confusing, but I find them seamless and profoundly moving, especially when he switches from Harvard to the Confederate retreat in 1865. The pentultimate scenes - the last conversation between Shreve McCaslin and Quentin, and Quentin's discovery at the ruined Sutpen plantation - are some of the finest writing by an American or anyone, ever. Who needs Anselm's ontological proof of God's existence when you have William Faulkner?

Yes, the book is dense, with Faulkner's famous page-long sentences. But allow yourself to be drawn into the strange and brutal magic of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha, Faulkner's tragic vision of history, and you'll come away enriched, knowing more not only about America's greatest tragedy, but the nature of man himself.

Absalom, Absalom! is Faulkner's great novel of the rise and fall of the Sutpen dynasty and a great allegory of the rise and fall of the Old South. It should be noted that first of all this is probably Faulkner's greatest and most difficult work.

The book told through three interconnected narratives tells the life story of Thomas Sutpen. The story parallels the rise of the Old South. The narratives are not straight forward and present a constant challenge to the reader. But if the reader does not close the book in despair the rewards are great indeed.

The mood of the storytelling alone is worth the price of admission here. The long flowing sentences are marvels and testaments to Faulker's skill as a writer. The narrative drive makes reading the book almost like reading Greek tragedy. We gets views of Sutpens life from several townspeople and also across generations.

This is the first book that I've read in a long time that made me feel like I had accomplished something when I finished it. You don't so much read this novel as you become lost in it. Jump in get your feet wet and prepare for some of the most intense Southern gothic that you are ever likely to read.

This book is actually a chain of short-stories that Faulkner wrote during the mid-thirties and then collected them in novel form. For the beginning reader who wants to read Faulkner but is daunted by The Sound and the Fury or Absolam, Absolam!, The Unvanquished gives the skeletons of Faulkner's work-- the racial interplay, the fading glory of the South, familial conflicts and the politics of Reconstruction-- without the sometime burdens of his meatier prose. It's not a lightweight book, though. It is powerful and often neglected. I wrote my senior undergraduate thesis on this novel, and close reading just proved that even Faulkner's lesser works are better than a lot of other writers' masterpieces.

Faulkner is one of my personal favorite authors. I had to read him in Eng 101 in college, and to my astonishment, I loved his work. Comparing two or more Faulkner novels is a futile effort; his voice travels on such ingenious octaves as one such as myself may never fully comprehend. This book is a great read, as well as a statement about the effects of the Civil War on the inhabitants of the South. I shall never forget the chapter entitled "an odor of verbena." It's been almost five years since I read this book, and I can still stand with the protagonist on that balcony and feel the electricity that charges the verbena soaked air. Faulkner just does that to ya :)

This book, in my opinion, is the best introduction to Faulkner possible where the reader has a chance to become accustomed to the sentence structure (to some extent: the longest sentence in The Unvanquished doesn't seem to run for even a page, making this quite simplistic by Faulknerian standards) without having to worry about an overly confused plot. Although there are parts where the reader will have to back up and read a passage over, it is far more straightforward than others of Faulkner's works.

This story chronicles the growth of Bayard Sartoris from the child who thinks war is a game (even though it isn't all that far from him) and can't imagine the consequences when he plays his games a little too close to the Yankees (Ambuscade) into a man who, when faced with the tragedy of his father's demise, must make this decision: who lives by the sword shall die by it--is it time to change the Southern tradition of bloodshed?

It is also the story of the South as it undergoes its most severe upheaval in its history: the Civil War and Reconstruction, and the effect on its people.

In my opinion, the best way to get acquainted with Faulkner is to begin with The Unvanquished. Once you're done with that, I suggest Intruder in the Dust. Be warned, though, that the latter isn't nearly as simple as The Unvanquished and there is a sentence that (if I recall correctly) runs for five or six pages (or more, but I'm not entirely sure). The good thing, at least, is that you can get used to the confusing syntax while the plot is still reasonably clear: what is clearer than a murder mystery and story of racial injustice (which, as the reader will gather from The Unvanquished, is one of the themes with which Faulkner is concerned in almost all his works)? Once you are used to seeing things from a somewhat blurred perspective (and to dealing with that syntax and stream-of-consciousness technique), I suggest moving on to Go Down, Moses (but you REALLY need to look at a McCaslin genealogy first, and to do this you should go to William Faulkner On the Web), and the stories in this book range from fairly simple to truly confusing (The Bear: it is in this story where you will be very glad you read Intruder In the Dust first!). And finally, you're ready for The Sound and the Fury (all of this, of course, is my own opinion about Faulkner; the reader may tackle these books in any order which he or she chooses: BUT DEFINITELY START WITH THE UNVANQUISHED!)

I just finished reading Light in August, and as a huge fan of Faulkner's, I would have to say that it was not one of his best. The characters are amazingly drawn out, but at times too drawn out. Faulkner goes on and on about Joe Christmas--we never get to feel what Lena Grove is going through as she searches for her baby's father. Although the book is written technically well, it lacks the passion and drive that is so inherent in other Faulkner works like "The Sound and the Fury" and "Sanctuary." Definately an important read, but I would not necessarily say a great one.

I only gave this book four stars because I don't believe it measures up to his two best works:Absalom, Absalom! and As I Lay Dying.-It is well worth remembering that Faulkner began his literary career with visions of being a poet. His first published work was a collection of verse entitled The Marble Faun. His failure as a poet outright may help explain why his prose is so turgid, convoluted but also profound and insightful beyond MERE prose. It's as if he's trying to correct his initial failure as intensely as posible. In the process of doing so, he became one of the gratest novelists in 20th Century American Literature. (Second only to Thomas Wolfe in my opinion.)-I guess the reason I like this book less than the aforementioned Faulkner works is the same reason most of the other reviewers like it more: It doesn't have enough of that turgid, mystical omniscient kaleidoscopic introspective prose that make the other novels so brilliant; But also, I admit, harder to plough through for a beginner.-Here's an example of what I'm talking about: Joe Christmas is observing his mistress in the daylight, "Meanwhile he could see her from a distance now and then in the daytime, about the rear premises, where moved articulate beneath the clean, austere garments that she wore that rotten richness ready to flow into putrefaction at a touch,like something growing in a swamp, not once looking toward the cabin or toward him. And when he thought of that other personality that seemed to exist somewhere in the darkness itself, it seemed to him that what he saw now by daylight was a phantom of someone whom the night sister had murdered and which now moved purposeless about the scenes of old peace, robbed even of the power of lamenting."-It's this eerie poetic perspctive that make Faulkner not just any writer, but a great one. It captures how fleeting identity and, indeed, life is. His language can make the characters vacillate between flesh-and-blood and psychopathic visions at the stroke of a pen. If you're new to Faulkner, read As I Lay Dying next and his perturbing magic will continue to grow on you. Perhaps, "like something growing in a swamp."-rare, foreboding, and to be approached circuitously, lest you slip into murky depths!

Light In August is America's finest novel about the South, and the struggle to come to grips with the entire country's racial problems. It tells the story of four very different characters:
Lena Grove, a young pregnant woman, searching for the deadbeat father of her child; Byron Bunch, the man she meets in her search who falls in love with her; Rev. Hightower, Bunch's friend, an ostracized cleric; and Joe Christmas, a man of dubious racial origin.

Faulkner tells each story with the ease of a great storyteller. He moves the story back and forth in time, although the actual time elapsed from the beginning to the end of the novel is a few short days. Each of the stories intersects the others and a complete world is woven from their details.

Lena is looking for her "fiancée", a man named "Brown" who left her as soon as he heard the "happy news." She is capable of enormous perseverance and is determined to make a family for herself and her child. Against all odds, she seems destined to succeed.

Byron is biding time, waiting for his life to begin. His love of Lena gives him his purpose in life, and starts him on the journey to becoming a man.

Rev. Hightower is biding his time, also, waiting for his life to end. It ended many years before when he lacked the courage to help or deal with a wife who went insane. He finds his salvation at the novels end when he finds the courage to try to help someone, even though he fails.

And Joe Christmas - a man who pretends to be have black blood in him, and lives in both the white and black worlds. Most reviewers mistakenly believe that he is half-black. In fact, his father is described as a foreigner, and may or may not be black. It doesn't matter because Joe has come to believe that he is part black. The perception has more reality than the truth.

The novel streaks through the central events of the book - including sexual depravity and a gruesome murder. There are dozens of minor characters who have more life to them than in a dozen novels of a Grishom or King.

This book should be read and re-read - just for the fun of it. It's a great book because it is a page-turner, a romance, a character study, a ... well, a great read!

William Faulkner wraps up the epic saga of the Snopes family by telling the story of the monstrous Mink, a convicted amoral murderer and victim of counsin Flem's conniving ways. Several other characters from various other stories come and go, allowing Faulkner to wrap up another Jefferson tale or two. As is the case with all of Faulkner's tales, the story has a deeper significance to the human condition. Highly recommended.

Surprisingly enough, I found The Mansion to be the best novel in Faulkner's impressive Snopes trilogy. Flem Snopes, the devious and underhanded antihero of The Hamlet and The Town is on a crash course with Mink Snopes, the unbalanced family member whom Flem allowed to be imprisoned for murder nearly four decades earlier. The paths of these two characters converge with fascinating inevitability, as Gavin Stevens and Linda Snopes finally arrive at a crossroads in their own relationship. The Mansion is a satisfying conclusion to a story that spans over forty years in the history of Jefferson, Mississippi; the Snopes trilogy is a must-read for Faulkner fans.

This book (The Mansion) was my first experience with William Faulkner. I plan to read more. Despite his tendency towards long sentences that are impossible to parse, Faulkner has created an extremely compelling story chronicling 40 years in the history of a family and a town in the deep South. Having been raised in the South (although certainly long after the setting of these events), I found many of the characters, and certainly some of the attitudes towards the rest of the world, eerily familiar.

This epic of the rise and fall of the Snopes family illustrates the tremendous impact a single family can have on a community, especially when that family is driven by naked ambition. In the course of his narrative Faulkner also reveals how the inhabitants of a small town in the South viewed such events as World Wars I and II, the New Deal, and the beginnings of the Civil Rights movement.

Although this book is the last of a trilogy, I found it to stand on its own very well. In fact, the first chapter stands on its own and is worth reading all by itself - in my view it's a near-perfectly constructed short story.

An influential collection, partly responsible for the late 1940s resurgence of interest in America's greatest author, this construction of Faulkner's narrative world is certainly no substitute for any of the novels. But it has its uses: readers who don't plan to read more than 3 of Faulkner's best novels may find some of Cowley's excerpts a reasonable consolation; Cowley's chronological ordering not only clarifies Faulkner's fictional world but exposes its organic unity; with the exception of "Barn Burning," most of the essential short fiction (including the frequently excerpted "The Bear") can be found here; the concluding commentary and genealogy which Cowley elicted from Faulkner himself is both helpful and a kind of Faulknerian literary piece in its own right.

A slight "down side" (apart from some questionable excerpting and over-emphasis on chronological at the expense of "narrative" time) is Cowley's somewhat "dated" aesthetic judgements (though at times refreshing, since the author was applying them to a "non-canonical" writer).

As for "Burn Burning," it's readily available, free of charge, on the Internet.

The Portable Faulkner is a wonderful intro to Faulkner, but it's just that--an introduction. It can't do whan the entirety of one of Faulkner's novels will do, and in some cases I recommend skipping a bit in the Portable Faulkner until the corresponding novel has already been read (for example, Dilsey's section of The Sound and the Fury shouldn't be read in the Portable if you haven't read The Sound and the Fury. Trust me, TSatF is a book where you don't want to read the last chapter before the first three).

Better than an introduction, the Portable Faulkner also serves as a very interesting companion to those already familiar with Faulkner--it does the great service to readers of putting Yoknapatawpha stories in chronological order, which is an interesting perspective we may not otherwise get to see.

However, above all, there are two reasons why I bought this book.

First, it includes the Compson Appendix. If you've read a copy of the Sound and the Fury that didn't include the Compson Appendix, you need this. It's something that has to be read after the Sound and the Fury to capture the whole of Faulkner's story.

Second, it includes Faulkner's Nobel acceptance speech, which is wonderful, especially as a complement to reading the books themselves, and which is very nice to have in book format like the Portable Faulkner.

The Portable Faulkner is THE way to be introduced to William Faulkner, arguably the best of 20th century American novelists. Cowley arranges whole work and excerpts chronological for Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County; it should be noted that Faulkner did not write his body of work chronologically. By arranging the work in this way, Cowley does us a great service in seeing Faulkner's great creation as an ordered whole.

The drawback to this work is in its goal -- to make more understandable Faulkner's creation in his mythic county. The drawback is that, by design, none of Faulkner's other work is included, such as The Fable.

The Portable Faulkner should be viewed only as an introduction, a tantalizer. Upon seeing the greatest of the work, we can then proceed to the work in its entirety.

This is a very intelligent novel. Faulkner's style is very different from many other authors. I liked the characters' psychological description, very well done. However, for moments the novel was distracting because it was not easy to follow the story. Anyway, I found it worth reading to know Faulkner's style.

I love this guy Faulkner. I read another half chapter of The Wild Palms on the train.
Never read anything by him before.

Faulkner's characters don't sit around and examine their navel. They just Do. Yes act on their passions they Do. His characters are not beautiful people. They have scars, injuries, poverty, depraved morals, injustices, suffering upon suffering. What makes the Wild Palms beautiful is the passion of people living life right on the bone.

A married woman is planning on abandoning her husband and two kids and running away with another man. The other man asks her what about her two kids. On page 41, she answers, "I know the answer to that and I know that I cant change that answer and I dont think I can change me because the second time I ever saw you I learned what I had read in books but I never had actually believed: that love and suffering are the same thing and that the value of love is the sum of what you have to pay for it and anytime you get it cheap you have cheated yourself." No Catholic saint-mystic ever said it better. Pretty good for a crazy Protestant drunk.

You hear talk about stream-of consciousness with James Joyce and Jack Kerouac and so on. This guy Faulkner captures the way our minds think and our mouths talk more realistically than anybody.

Of Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor said, "Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track when the Dixie Limited is roaring down."

Something about this book reminds me of the Stephen King material set in the south, the Southern-ness of it and the same kind of characters.

The omniscient author technique is frowned on in serious, modern literature. I don't knw if this aesthetic rule post-dates Faulkner, but he uses it to no ill effect. There's very little difference between when a character is speaking and Faulkner is speaking. It gives the effect of us reading the characters thoughts rather than Faulkner telling us what they are. It works perfectly.

Few to none of the characters in any of the standard, best-seller type books have any inner life. When most of the authors try it, they are quite pathetic at it. I suppose that's because the authors have no inner life themselves. Faulkner does not show us the inner life of any of his characters either. However, as Faulker presents his characters, the reader induces their inner drives from their actions. It works very, very well. Stephen King's characters are like this also.

Stephen King by the way is very steeped in American literary tradition. Essentially, he's New England gothic. He is to Nathaniel Hawthorne what the Frankenstein, the monster, is to Dr. Frankenstein. King is clothed in Hawthorne, bathed in Faulkner and inebriated with Poe. To look at the connection further, I suggest you read the short stories of Hawthorne.

Faulkner is not everybody's cup of tea, but he happens to be my favorite American writer. While the critics and all those "best books of the century" lists consistently feature "The Sound and the Fury", "Absalom, Absalom" and maybe "As I Lay Dying" as Faulkner's major works--and I too like those books--I have always thought THE WILD PALMS a gem. An underrated, forgotten gem. Perhaps it really isn't his best novel, but still it is a work of genius. I recently re-read it.

Very few novels on the world stage are composed of two completely separate stories. THE WILD PALMS consists of 1) a love story in 1938, taking place in New Orleans, Chicago, Wisconsin, Utah, San Antonio, and the Mississippi Gulf coast, and 2) the story of one man (a prisoner) and his mighty ordeal during the Mississippi River floods of 1927. Parchman State Prison in Mississippi is the sole physical point that joins the two tales, otherwise separate in time, place, class, and impulse. But Faulkner's genius is such that the reader soon understands that the theme of both stories is the same. Faulkner's novels often focus on Fate, how the individual is caught in mysterious, giant webs of 'outrageous fortune' beyond comprehension, helpless to oppose the powerful, hidden currents. The present volume is no exception. "You are born submerged in anonymous lockstep"--the main character of story #1 muses on page 54--"with the seeming anonymous myriads of your time and generation; you get out of step once, falter once, and you are trampled to death." In the first case, Wilbourne and Charlotte deviate from the usual path for love's sake, strive mightily to maintain and cherish that love, and pay an inevitable price. In the second, a convict is caught in a flood in a tiny boat when sent to save two people. He rescues one, but is swept away. He completes his mission, returning both boat and rescued woman, despite incredible hardships, only to face a certain ironic destiny. In both cases, other lives or other destinies constantly present themselves, but the protagonists refuse to alter their selected course. It is the antithesis to the Hollywood message that "you can be whatever you want in life, you just have to want it badly enough". Faulkner plumps for Destiny. A person might be, he says on page 266, "...no more than the water bug upon the surface of the pond, the plumbless and lurking depths of which he would never know..." one's only contact with such depths being when Fate is blindly accepted and played out to the bitter end. The forces of Nature, symbolized by the wild clashing of the palm fronds in the winds off the Gulf of Mexico, always outweigh the strength of human beings. The palms clash in the wind at the beginning and at the very end as well. Faulkner concludes that bearing grief, living with it, is better than suicide, better than obliterating the agonies of remembrance with a pill or bullet. Memory, however, bitter and painful, is better than nothingness. The two main characters end in prison, a most un-optimistic metaphor for life. A most powerful novel, a novel that speaks from the crocodile-haunted deeps of every person's psyche.

Some fans of Faulkner have bemoaned the fact that his final novel is not a profound summation of his heftier, more philosophical works (as though Faulkner could have foreseen his own death and owed his readers that much). While it is true that The Reivers is a much lighter (and more comical) work than those commonly regarded as Faulkner's "masterpieces," it is still worthy of attention. For one thing, The Reivers is Faulkner at his most entertaining; unburdened by the need to address the darker symptoms of the human condition, he is free to let his imagination run wild: the trials and triumphs of young Lucius Priest and his travelling companions make for some hilarious scenes and leave the reader feeling far more bouyant at the novel's close that, say, at the end of The Sound and the Fury or Absalom, Absalom!. The Reivers also features two additional benefits: the divine Miss Reba (second only to Granny Millard as Faulkner's most entertaining and resourceful female character); and the much-appreciated absence of that nosy and annoying popinjay Gavin Stevens. While one might read The Reivers as a Bildungsroman (Lucius's growth and awakening to the realities of the world around him are clearly underscored throughout the novel), I prefer to see it as a simple, amusing and satisfying story from a man who, by the end of his life, had done more to explore the human condition than most writers ever attempt - and was content to leave it at that.

I remember reading Faulkner's Sound and the Fury as a college sophmore and swearing never to read another book by him again. I happened to find the Reivers in my local library and decided to give his Pulitzer Prize winning book a try. It is a charming book that tells the story of a stolen car, a stolen horse, a horse race, and the life changing experiences of an 11 year old boy in the course of a week. Although Faulkner employs colons and semicolons more than any writer, and his sentences seem to continue on indefinitely, the effort of adjusting to his style rewards the reader with a wonderful tale. I highly reccomend this book, and hope to try another Faulkner book in the near future. Maybe I will even attempt the Sound and the Fury someday.

Have you ever read a novel or a short story and felt an urgency to finish it but also an urgency to never finish? That's how I felt while reading Faulkner's The Reivers. This Pulitzer prize novel concerns one eleven-year-old white boy named Lucius Priest. Through the mediation of his father's underlings--Boon Hoggenbeck and Ned McCaslin--Lucius comes of age in the art of non-virtue. While Lucius's grandfather is away, the three of them "borrow" the old man's automobile and embark on a bumpy journey to Memphis. On the trip, Lucius sees it all--whoredom, lust, theft, profanity, gambling--and struggles with these things in the context of a southern religious tradition. Though he has every opportunity to turn back and forgo the trip, he presses on and convinces himself that it's all too late. Non-virtue has already embraced him. On the other hand, Boon and Ned have no doubts of their lack of virtue, and when they see Lucius drinking from evil's muddy waters, they just nod their heads (don't think that the story is grim, for it's down right funny at times). The story is addictive, even though the language is rocky and convoluted at times. Faulker was no Raymond Carver or Ernest Hemingway; conversely, he was the ultimate practitioner of the compound-complex sentence. The dialogue was so real, especially with Ned and other black folks. I felt as though I were standing around the campfire chewing tobacco and thumbing my suspenders and talking about horse racing. No wonder this novel hooked the Pulitzer. It's quality stuff.

He evidently has no idea of how to read text that makes certain demands upon the reader. Faulkner's writing is complex, sometimes difficult, yes. But if you read with even the smallest amount of serious attention, you will see that Faulkner knows precisely what he is doing, that those long sentences make perfect sense, and this is seldom more in evidence than in The Hamlet, one of Faulkner's finest works. If you can't take it, fine. Go back to reading John Grisham.

Dickens with the DT's. Comic scenes are laced with violence and passion. Drawling horse traders, "dumb like a fox," seek to outdo each other, with farcical results. A shotgun blast cuts short a life we had come to find fascinating, and we're jolted. The images are laid on top of each other like thick paint on a canvas. Somehow, Faulkner makes it possible for us to hear and see and smell it all at once. This is not so much a book as an enchantment, a spell.

Although I have been a Faulkner fan practically since birth, I put off reading the Snopes trilogy for years because, I suppose, it seemed inconceivable that Faulkner could write more than a small number of books as gripping and involved as "The Sound and the Fury" or "Light in August" or "Absalom, Absalom"; in other words, I delayed reading the back volumes of his oeuvre, as it were, in order to stave off disappointment, to delay the moment at which I would have to admit that Faulkner, even Faulkner, could not be great all of the time. After all, who could expect such Biblical grandeur and keen insight from yet another book covering the same Mississippi turf? But Faulkner is nothing if not surprising: his prose here is just as innovative and finely-tuned as in his better-known work, and the chapters -- many of them published separately as short stories, such as the famed "Spotted Horses" -- are individual gems which, when added up and interconnected, form a satisfyingly complex and interdependent whole. Faulkner is the very greatest, the writer who almost single-handedly raised American literature to the level of myth; who saw most clearly the meaning of roots and background in the shaping of human lives; who understood most incisively how such stories could grip and lash the imagination, and the consciousness, of a receptive reader. I plan to read the next installments of this trilogy post-haste, without regard to potential disappointment: I trust him now to take the story to new heights.

Faulkner again proved himself a master of American literature with his tragic story of Joe Christmas, a truly unlucky and unloved fellow whose life of rejection has led him to make some truly unwise choices. Crafted in Faulkner's signature intellectual, sometimes verbose, style, this novel is an important examination of some major flaws in the typical American character. We all identify with the characters in this book.

Faulkner's usually troubled and at times brutal writing is interwoven with periodic examples of the best in humankind. In Joe Christmas we see the worst in all of us and the reasons behind it. In this sense Faulkner teaches us a lesson about the difference between explanation and justification. By having Christmas come from seemingly the worst of backgrounds and then committing the worst of crimes creates a stuggle within the reader to understand their own limits of what makes this or that "okay". It is a novel of hope, however, and despite the ruthlessness and cruelty of those on both sides of the law there are characters that are examples of what we, as human should and can be. The true genius of Faulkner lays in the ability he has to lay two extremes and then bring them together into a coherent, poignant, emotional story. Excellent read

Just when I thought the only Faulkner book I would ever remotely understand was his Sanctuary---along comes the serendipitous discovery of Light in August. It is a relatively straightforward journey into the lives of yet another cast of tragic Southern characters; a dark, mythic voyage into the subterannean caverns of their souls...or something like that. Faulkner truly does an impressive job of mining the psychological depths of his characters, often through the technique for which he's famous---Stream of Consciousness. If you've stumbled over Faulkner's difficult style in novels like As I Lay Dying and Intruders in the dust then this book, along with Sanctuary, is an excellent starting point. Grab a strong cup of coffee, make sure your reading light is bright, and good luck.