Books by William Faulkner
“The Portable Faulkner is composed mainly of extracts from Absalom, Absalom!, The Unvanquished, The Hamlet, The Sound and the Fury, The Wild Palms, Sanctuary, and Light in August – so, most of Faulkner’s major works prior to 1946 (the year the Portable was published)…Cowley’s introduction essentially outlined what so many literary critics at the time had missed—that Faulkner was a major talent, a writer of genius whose Yoknapatawpha fiction was as major an intervention in modern literature as Joyce’s Dublin or Hardy’s Wessex” Read more...
The Best William Faulkner Books
Ahmed Honeini, Literary Scholar
“I must admit, I hated Sanctuary for a long time and only recently changed my mind. Sanctuary tells an extremely disturbing story: a young woman, Temple Drake, is held captive by a gang of bootleggers in an abandoned house known as ‘the Old Frenchman place’. The novel outlines Temple’s often futile attempts to escape the gang and find the elusive sanctuary Faulkner conjures up in the title.” Read more...
The Best William Faulkner Books
Ahmed Honeini, Literary Scholar
“Actually, thinking about it now, I would have liked to put As I Lay Dying (1930) on here, not least because it’s also a genuinely great comic novel. The line where the doctor says of Anse Bundren, ‘you could have stuck his head into the saw and cured a whole family’ is so pithy. I love it.” Read more...
“The classic Faulkner line that everybody trots out is: ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’ Absalom, Absalom! is the great iteration of that line. It’s not even real; it’s become a chimera or a fabrication, another story being told. It’s a live issue that is sustaining and replenishing people. Or, in an awful way, they are kind of yoked to it, doomed to have the same argument again and again and never get to the end of it. Absalom, Absalom!—to the point that it baffles a lot of people—is the greatest exploration of that Southern theme.” Read more...
The Best Historical Fiction Set in the American South
Xan Brooks, Novelist
Interviews where books by William Faulkner were recommended
The Best Historical Fiction Set in the American South, recommended by Xan Brooks
The ‘Deep’ South is a complicated place with a complicated history. But that’s what makes it such an effective literary setting, says Xan Brooks—author of The Catchers, a story of Blues music and exploitation that unfolds in the Mississippi Delta. Here he recommends some of the best historical fiction set in the American South, including novels by Flannery O’Connor and Mark Twain.
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1
Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory
by David Blight -
2
The Fiery Trial
by Eric Foner -
3
Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South
by Stephanie McCurry -
4
Absalom, Absalom!
by William Faulkner -
5
The Annotated Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant
by Ulysses S Grant and Elizabeth Samet (editor), Mark Bramhall (narrator)
The best books on The American Civil War, recommended by Drew Gilpin Faust
The best books on The American Civil War, recommended by Drew Gilpin Faust
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” wrote William Faulkner. Here, Drew Gilpin Faust, a leading historian of the American Civil War and former President of Harvard, recommends the best books to read about the conflict between North and South that tore the United States apart from 1861 till 1865 – and beyond.
The Best 20th-Century American Novels, recommended by David Hering
The story of America is not one of a manageable unified nation, says novelist and critic David Hering. It may, however, be the story of America’s dream — which is why many of the best American novels have a distinctly dreamlike quality. He picks out five of the best American novels of the 20th century, from 1905 through to 1987.
The Best William Faulkner Books, recommended by Ahmed Honeini
Where to start with the novels of the American writer William Faulkner, chronicler of the Old South and winner of the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature? Here, Faulkner scholar Ahmed Honeini of Royal Holloway, University of London, recommends the best books by and about the man who tried to capture “the agony and sweat of the human spirit”.
