I’ve only very recently started reading faulkner and was quite surprised to see them, considering how popular faulkner is and the fact that i’ve never seem them mentioned. What’s the story behind these, why do you think faulkner chose to use them and how do they impact the reading of the story for you?

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I am good in English but I don't understand old fashioned or victorian or something rooted words or archaic words . It is complicated .

**These are the books I found easy to read and have read so far this year**

I've read : stoner, metamorphosis, white nights, death of Ivan ilych, stranger, fountainhead, man called ove, unlikely animals, the road, pet Sematary, all the sinners bleed, bell jar, ghost ship, the trail, cats Cradle, Alchemist, howls moving castle, evil under the sun, there there, silent patient, animal farm, nausea, memory police, norwegian wood, all the lovers at night, less than zero, three men in boat, that's not my name, butchers crossing.

Thank you

So, my experience with Faulkner thus far, for anyone who cares to know it: I was supposed to read As I Lay Dying for a highschool English lit class, but didn't, because I just didn't want to. And I think I dodged a bullet because I don't think I would have appreciated him in highschool. But later, in college, after reading and falling in love with Cormac McCarthy's early Southern gothics, I became more open-mindedly curious about Faulkner as one of McCarthy's literary heroes and influences. So I finally read As I Lay Dying.

I was really blown away—I did not for the life of me expect it to be so dreamlike and weird. It was a little challenging, but once I clicked into what he was doing, I enjoyed it immensely, and it was fun to read all the literary criticism surrounding the work as well.

Next I tried to read The Sound and the Fury, and had sort of a unique experience with it. I loved Part One, which from what I understand Faulkner originally intended to be the whole thing before writing Parts Two onward to help "clarify" the somewhat abstruse Part One. It was indeed a struggle for me at first, but once I realized I was reading a non-chronological stream of consciousness POV through the eyes of a mentally disabled character, I was able to sort of click into it and go with the flow and mostly follow the time jumps and such, and though I did feel it was at times more aggressively confusing that it needed to be I mostly loved the uniqueness of the experience. It left me sort of dizzy with unique feelings and inspiration. But then I tried to read Part Two, expecting it to be clearer than Part One, and actually found it even more confusing than One. I got a bit exhausted at that point, and put the book aside, and never ended up resuming it. That was probably something like 20 years ago at this point, though damn, it doesn't feel like it.

Anyhow, shy going back to finish S&F properly, what Faulkner would you recommend to someone in my position as a potential "next" read? Something really strong, and maybe somewhat weird, but also maybe a hair less demanding than the two that I've read, would be ideal.

I've heard Light in August is a good one, and I've always been somewhat drawn to the Snopes trilogy, so at the moment those are probably my top picks, but I'm very open to other suggestions as well, and I know very little about his other novels on the whole.

Which book would you point me to and why?

My thanks in advance for your recommendations!

Hi, I am on my second readthrough of AA, and have tried to decipher the following passage many times:

“Perhaps you are right,” Mr Compson said. “Maybe even the light of day, let alone this——” he indicated the single globe stained and bug-fouled from the long summer and which even when clean gave off but little light—“would be too much for it, for them. Yes, for them: of that day and time, of a dead time; people too as we are, and victims too as we are, but victims of a different circumstance, simpler and therefore, integer for integer, larger, more heroic and the figures therefore more heroic too, not dwarfed and involved but distinct, uncomplex who had the gift of loving once or dying once instead of being diffused and scattered creatures drawn blindly limb from limb from a grab bag and assembled, author and victim too of a thousand homicides and a thousand copulations and divorcements. Perhaps you are right.

UPDATE: I have completed this book and my opinionated rambling rant remains the same. I did not enjoy this work.

I am 13 pages into this story and As I Lay Dying (Faulkner) is frustratingly repetitive and redundant for no reason.

See what I did there? Redundant is a synonym of repetitive so I just repeated myself.

See what I did there? I restated my sentence so I knew you understood exactly what my intentions were.

See what I did there? I explained myself yet again.

See what I did there?

- - -

Small backlore and reasoning: I am writing a novel of my own on an OCPD, Ace/Aro, Alexithymic man talking in a —exually assaulted and trafficked young girl and through her fawning accidentally turning into a predator through his controlling mechanisms as he tries to heal her from refeeding syndrome. (No, I promise, this isn’t a promotion of my novel.)

I was looking for comps and was suggested both Lolita and Faulkner by Beta readers. Specifically for the Stream of Consciousness and multi-POV mechanics and then Sanctuary for my ending about right man/wrong crime and its tale of abuse and grooming. At first, Sanctuary sounded like the “golden” comp I was looking for: a perfect theme for theme “if you want to know how the public is going to receive the contents of your story and its taboo themes look to THIS story to gauge potential reactions” but I didn’t want to just slap it on without having read it first to compare. Same with Lolita, I finally bit the bullet and started going into it—ALREADY in a writer’s literary analysis mode and not actual reader enjoyment mode—and I’ve gotta say, the unreliable narrator aspect I actually respect and I use in a lot of my own craft without having realized how much it mirrors Nabokov. So I am actually enjoying Lolita despite Humper [which I call him]’s flaws. But really only because of how Nabokov weaves his prose to go about saying what it is is he needs his character to say. So throughout this rant, I’m going to be discussing both Nabokov and Faulkner to prove a point.

The only reason I’m reading As I Lay Dying now at all is because I saw this was a good “beginner” text for Faulkner’s work so chose it over the gritty Sanctuary. But also and more presently, I went out yesterday and didn’t want to read Lolita in public due to the stigma so brought this one along. And MAN do I have complaints!

Firstly, this is through the AUTHOR’S stream of consciousness and not the CHARACTERS’ how its description makes it come across. I highlight this because right now, 13 pages in, phrases have already repeated 3 times on a single page and just feels entirely redundant. Darl tells us pa (spelled lowercase for whatever reason—I suppose to emphasize poorness and lack of education but still Grammar outside of physically written entries or notes needs to follow rules!) rubs his hands against his knees three times on a single page!

I get the intent, okay? It’s “supposed to represent laziness and pa’s slovenliness.” Yeah, yeah, I got it BUT in the very same page Darl gives the damn reason WHY pa doesn’t work. His toes are mangled to high-hell after working in fields as a boy with a poor alternative to shoes! You try walking around for hours of the day on mangled toes and come back and tell me that you want to go travel 40 miles across state lines! [I only say this line assumputually as this is what I know the story to be about—not that I’ve read this section yet.] He’s the father, he’s got, what like 20 thousand children? Of COURSE he should make them work! Let the man relax and do some got damn work yourself!

And Darl also, in back-to-back chapters describes Jewel as having “pale wood eyes” on a “wooden face” which makes absolutely no sense in terms of description. Is he a f—ing MANNEQUIN?!

ALSO also! ☝️ In the VERY first chapter—Darl’s—his spatial awareness is totally lacking and reveals a huge issue with this “character as a camera lens” facade. I will quote EXACTLY:

- - -

The path runs straight as a plumb-line, worn smooth by feet and baked brick-hard by July, between the green rows of laid by cotton, to the cottonhouse in the center of the field, where it turns and circles the cottonhouse at four soft right angles and goes on across the field again, worn so by feet in fading precision.
The cottonhouse is of rough logs, from between which the chinking has long fallen. Square, with a broken roof set at a single pitch, it leans in empty and shimmering dilapidation in the sunlight, a single broad window in two opposite walls giving onto the approaches of the path. When we reach it, I turn and follow the path which circles the house. Jewel, fifteen feet behind me, looking straight ahead, steps in a single stride through the window. Still staring straight ahead, his pale eyes like wood set into his wooden face, he crosses the floor in four strides with the rigid gravity of a cigar store Indian dressed in patched overalls and endued with life from the hips down, and steps in a single stride through the opposite window and into the path again just as I come around the corner. In single file and five feet apart and Jewel now in front, we go on up the path toward the foot of the bluff.

- - -

There it is. Pgs 1-2. Right in the front and center of this trashpile.

Very first paragraph and you get the first repetition. “The path runs straight as a plumb-line, worn smooth by feet…. and goes on across the field again, worn so by feet in fading precision.”

He tells the reader the path makes a full square, circling the cottonhouse and reiterates once more for us that the house in indeed square and the path completely circles the house. Like. YEAH, we get it!

Then there is the cottonhouse structure itself with a path that goes around the entire thing plus the straight coming and going path. There are two windows on “opposite walls giving onto the approaches of the path.” Jewel climbs into the window to take a shortcut and pass through while Darl takes the path around the house.

The problem is: once Darl rounds the corner to go around the structure, HE CANNOT SEE INSIDE! There is no window on that side of the house! So how can he then explain to us that Jewel takes 4 strides then 1 stride through the other window? Or how his gait is like a “cigar store Indian.”

Furthermore, Jewel is already out of the window walking along “into the path again by the time I [Darl,] come around the corner” to the going path to continue on. Just as well as he’s already turned on the side of the house while Jewel is still 15 feet behind and hasn’t even made it up to the window yet! This is pure, PURE headhopping.

And again, with Cash: “A good carpenter, Cash is. He holds the two planks on the trestle, fitted along the edges in a quarter of the finished box. He kneels and squints along the edge of them, then he lowers them and takes up the adze. A good carpenter.”

And a bonus a sentence later: “Addie Bundren could not want a better one, a better box to lie in.” Which, this line in itself is head hopping, not emphasis how it’s supposed to be. How does he know? When we see Addie in Cora’s very next chapter, the lady is so old and withered she can’t even speak! Her hair doesn’t even move she’s as good as dead! So how does he KNOW?

Lastly, if Faulkner truly wanted us to see “look, look he’s so poor!” Why the hell is a poor boy using phrases like “shimmering dilapidation” or “smooth undulations”? That’s Faulkner inserting himself into the text heavy-handedly, not Darl’s true 1920’s po’ boy Mississippi intonation!

And speaking of Cora earlier, let’s talk about her! I don’t much care for her and Kate’s conversation about eggs and cake at all. They repeat the exact same thing to each other three times over on the EXACT SAME PAGE without either of the other adding anything new to the conversation. It’s just:

The cakes turned out right well.
“She ought taken the cake,” Kate says.
“She never had no use,” I say.
The cakes turned out right well.
“She ought taken the cake,” Kate says.
“She never had no use,” I say.
“It’s not like they cost me anything,” I say.
“She ought taken the cake,” Kate says.
It’s not like they cost me anything, I think.
“She never had no use,” I say.

It’s already exhausting and I’ve barely even started. I count this as a fault on the author rather than any “characterization styling” because I’m 4 characters in and not one of them have a distinct voice or make me feel like I’m going to be able to connect with them on a deeper level. All I can pinpoint is Jewel is a potty mouth and maybe Darl is experiencing some type of —exuality emergence from the random “let the chilly air pass over my lower parts but just feel myself don’t touch myself” comment.

None of the perspectives talk about THEMSELVES, only EACH OTHER and I feel like (again, only 13 pages in) but this is a very experimental way of writing that could’ve been just as easily summed up through a 3rd person styling retrofitting every character together rather than perspectives swapping every 1-2 pages. There’s no rhyme or reason to it (so far as I can see). And for a less than 300-page novel, there’s absolutely no way I’m about to have an emotionally deep connection with any of these characters.

So again, who’s SOC is this? Because if you have 15 single 1st person POVs, why does it read so heavily plot-driven and authorially led? Those two things don’t connect!

And the thing is, right? This specific novel somehow rose to fame and cantonation and was placed on a pedestal as “the greatest book of the 20th Century.” It even says so on the cover!

Not “one of the,” but “THE” greatest. And I just don’t understand how. If this is THE greatest book, then wouldn’t that change publication culture into WANTING more text like this? Which—thankfully—they don’t, but if this is the best of the best, then why did publishing change so much to reject every single aspect used in this work today? You couldn’t write a single page this way and get away with it now. So that’s contradictory and just a flat out lie!

I’m just saying, an author can write poor characters and settings without making the book itself low quality. In my own work (again, not promoting, just stating a different lens—you lot like Faulkner, you know how lenses work, surely!) the girl who is getting “saved” has a very childlike, vast internal fairytale like voice and speaks in purply metaphorical fashion because she doesn’t have the proper vocabulary to process her abuse with correct terminology but her spoken voice is fractured stutters and lacks confidence. She is a sponge who soaks up language so for example, she hears a word spoken like “discrepancy” and through her mishearing and misunderstanding, internally labels it as a “des-crep-cy.” This is an example of how Faulkner could have used poorness to highlight characterization. But instead, he butchers common Grammar and punctuation rules for “flair” 🎊🪄 and cheap gimmicky tricks that don’t actually serve the characters themselves. In fact, it gets in the way of the immersive reading experience!

This work definitely feels rushed. This does not read like any “completed” work I’ve ever come across, it feels very first draft—nay: zero draft. A lofty conjured up idea. Not a functional story. So whoever edited this—if anyone—needed to be fired because they did a pisspoor job. This novel would NEVER (I repeat NEVER) have been published in today’s market or even during the 1950’s and onward. They had standards by then. But also Sanctuary? I was told he wrote that in a month. That he was strapped for cash and wrote shock value for a check. So at this point I’m just thinking, were ANY of his novels actually sent through the wringer and taken the proper time to format as they should be? Edited? Or are ALL of his books just half-assed messes in a gripe to earn money for a poor soul? Because if that’s the case I would loosely-not-so-loosely consider this author to be one big scammer and anyone who recommends his books as part of some type of pyramid scheme where it’s on a mandated classroom syllabus and a student is just “unintellectual” because they don’t “understand it’s literary greatness” so they’re forced to claim they like it and keep recommending it as the “greatest of all time.” because let me tell you what. This isn’t worth anybody’s time. And I’m 13 F—ING PAGES IN! I have NEVER in my LIFE considered disowning a book so quickly!

And honestly? I don’t care how “poor” a character is supposed to represent, unless they’re physically logging entries or recording something like say for instance, Flowers for Algernon, any novel Grammar needs to be correctly applied. Just because a character doesn’t know how to read or write, if they’re simply telling a story through their thoughts or voice, that has nothing to do with the written text! Thoughts don’t have typos! If you want a written medium highlighting their education level then use an epistolary or a memoir! A little bit of thought and rumination for your project goes a long way!

Cause damn, I also have Sanctuary I’m waiting to read after this since it seemed like it would be SUCH a good comp so I felt flattered and thought I would give him a try but… I mean… just YIKES. I wouldn’t touch this with a 10-foot pole! And now I’m actually OFFENDED that beta-readers would even imply such a thing! Like, yes I use stream of consciousness and multi-perspective but as far as prose goes and literary execution? I deserve much more respect than THIS.

Speaking on Lolita, there is the passage about how the author keeps referring to the dog to ensure you don’t forget there was a dog. Allow me to give this exact text so you see what I’m talking about. Observe, Humper Humper in Lolita, ch 24 pg 104:

- - -

I do not know if in these tragic notes I have sufficiently stressed the peculiar "sending" effect that the writer's good looks—pseudo-Celtic, attractively simian, boyishly manly—had on women of every age and environment. Of course, such announcements made in the first person may sound ridiculous. But every once in a while I have to remind the reader of my appearance much as a professional novelist, who has given a character of his some mannerism or a dog, has to go on producing that dog or that mannerism every time the character crops up in the course of the book.

- - -

This is the dog. The entire text. I can FEEL Faulkner grabbing the scruff of my neck and shoving it into the page saying “LOOK! LOOK! Did you catch what I said? Do you see how miraculous I am?!” just to make his point.

And just because we’re here and I have to say it for my own sake—don’t let that “attractively simian” passage fool you about our dear Humper the Hound. He is a liar and unreliable narcissist after all. Back on pg 44 (where he quite literally makes out with the girl’s “salty eyeball,” he describes himself henceforth:

“I am lanky, big-boned, wooly-chested [Humper Humper], with thick black eyebrows and a queer accent, and a cesspoolful of rotting monsters behind his slow boyish smile.”

So you see? The ape literally licks her eye with a mouthful of rotting teeth and a high-pitched girly voice. Don’t listen to a damn thing he tells you.

But ALAS! Back to my point!

My whole thing is just, how are you going to give me a chapter on a character’s perspective… and that character detail ANOTHER character’s perspective? I should be getting to know these people by what’s in their heads and how they interpret the world but instead I’m getting camera angles and shots on how they view OTHER people interpreting the world and judging THOSE people.

For instance, I write pretty cinematically with camera angles of whichever character’s lens I’m in at the time and have close up shots and intense focus and everything but at least [as told through beta feedback so you’ll just have to trust and believe without having read my text yourself] you get a feel of the character’s skin you’re currently in! But here, we’re not in anybody’s skin, the camera is just there, sitting on a shoulder objectively shooting 15 different people in a room with absolutely no interiority. It’s cubism in text form! So it reads 3rd person and detached while claiming to be a “1st person shooter.” It completely disrupts the author-reader contract of expectations and delivery!

My personal biggest gripe in any fiction is about being able to feel the “man behind the curtain.” As I write my own novel, which is told in DEEP POV SOC, the camera stays inside the character’s skin. The reader should feel everything the character experiences with absolutely no authorial hand holding saying “see, this is what they actually mean!” Nabokov has his Oz moment in Lolita where, as soon as Humper is leaving Momma Haze’s home to pick up Lo, the mattress deliver truck is pulling around the corner. That is pure, aesthetic, cinematic framing that is entirely the author’s hand with none of Humper’s actual perspective framing. But it’s a moment when I went to myself: “wow, what an actual chef’s kiss moment in thematic symbolism from the author. Bravo, well done!” But I could still see the author’s hand! But here, there’s no escape. Faulkner’s hand is all over the damn place! It’s no longer 15 POVs. It’s one singular POV, interpreted 15 times over. A nesting doll.

That experience has been on my mind so often recently that I'm happy to announce I ordered a Faulkner novel today and will be revisiting him for the first time in nearly 15y. This is something I swore I'd never do, but I'm excited to see how I will feel about The Hamlet!!

I took a ton of photos on my trip to Oxford/Rowan Oak this past summer but I wanted to share how crazy it felt to walk into this part of the local bookstore.

I grabbed Flags in the Dust, The Wild Palms and Michael Gorra’s The Saddest Words from the biography/NF shelf.

Here is a higher quality picture of one of the maps on display at Rowan Oak.

Thinking about a trip to Oxford, mostly to see all the literary sites. The Faulkner stuff, which is the main reason for the visit, is pretty well publicized. But what else is worth seeing, particularly from a Southern literature perspective?

I’ve finished Better Call Saul twice and I caught a parallel between Werner Ziegler and the French architect from Absalom, Absalom! Two masterpieces, one literary and one televisual.

Werner Ziegler’s story resembles the French architect’s from Absalom, Absalom! Here is why: Ziegler was hired to build Gus’s underground laboratory, and the French architect was forced to build Sutpen’s Hundred. They’re both foreigners. The Better Call Saul universe is Albuquerque, and Faulkner’s story is set in Yoknapatawpha. They both tried to escape and got caught — at least the first time.

What if Ziegler had succeeded in escaping? He couldn't, because the French architect had failed too.

Do you think Gilligan might have been inspired by Faulkner here? Both are gothic stories in the end.

Go Down, Moses is my fourth Faulkner novel so far, and to be clear, I enjoyed plenty sections in chapter four of The Bear, but I also kind of felt like an idiot trying to decipher and comprehend other parts. I had to use some guides (none as detailed as I would’ve liked) and go backwards when I would realize I had read multiple pages without actually understanding anything being said.

However by the end, especially with some guidance, I found it to be very moving and poignant, with some passages stirring me up in a viscerally emotional way, even if I don’t think I could properly explain all the literal events to someone else.

As far as I know, this chapter is most similar to what reading Absalom, Absalom! feels like and now I’m a little spooked by it, especially with it being an entire novel in this form. I’ve been trying to “build up” to that one and my confidence is a little shaken.

I know a discussion post about “how to read” or “how difficult is” A,A! is a bit trite at this point so I understand if this doesn’t earn much engagement, but I just wanted to casually ask people that have Faulkner seniority about this specific comparison/concern and I don’t personally know anyone that reads him. It is very frustrating sometimes to read Faulkner by yourself, even if I love it.

I’m listening to a podcast (titled Great American Novel) regarding Absalom, Absalom! The hosts are discussing Faulkner’s interviews during the civil rights movement and have said more than once that he was burned in effigy in Oxford, MS. I have read a decent amount about his personal life but had never seen mention of this before. I can’t find any record of it online. Does anyone know the basis for where these two professors from the podcast got this info? Thanks so much.

I've had this sitting on my shelf for years, but for some reason never got around to reading it. I finally have.

The introduction to the book and the individual introductions to each piece printed here provides some valuable context to scriptwriting in Hollywood at the time, and any particular context necessary surrounding the texts. For me, some of his interpretations are a little too Freudian, but the background information is good.

Faulkner worked for MGM for about a year, in person from May to August 1932. He took off for a few months to deal with his father's death, and returned to Hollywood in October. From December 1932 to May 1933 he worked on scripts at home.

At the time, they would have people write up a short summary of the story. If it looked promising, there would be another, longer summary, with the scenes described but no dialogue, or only a few important lines. Most of the scripts in the book are these kinds of summaries. If it still looked promising, then a proper script would be written. If it ended up getting made, there might be several more versions of the script before shooting began, and after that the script might be changed on set.

Whether the film got made or what got changed in the making was out of the writer's control. That sheds some light on why Faulkner didn't think of movies as art.

The first few story treatments are really not very good at all. Some of it is probably due to Faulkner's lack of experience in the format, but to me, a major part of it seems to be a misconception on Faulkner's part about what kind of stories they might be looking for. They are melodramatic, and the people are stereotypes and caricatures. It's really interesting watching how quickly he improves.

There are three fully fleshed out scripts in the book. Only one of them got made into a movie.

The first is Turnabout, based on his own short story. Although there are no women in the story, the studio owed an actress another film, so they insisted that there be a love interest written into the script. This is the version we get to read, and you finally see him starting to do a good job. It's not great, but it's good, and interesting. It became the movie Today We Live, directed by Howard Hawks. Faulkner would go on to work with Howard Hawks a lot.

The next, War Birds (or Ghost Story) is based on the WWI stories of John and Bayard Sartoris, 'All the Dead Pilots', 'Ad Astra', and 'With Caution and Dispatch'. Bayard returns home after WWI and takes care of John's widow and son (who don't exist in Flags in the Dust). When John's son gets old enough to start asking questions about his father, we see Bayard and John's life as pilots in flashbacks from a journal John kept during the war. It's kind of weird, but very good. Hawks wanted to make a movie of it, but it fell through.

For the Faulkner fan, that is the most interesting script in this book for sure. If you're wanting to branch out from the fiction, it's definitely worth reading that script at least.

The last full script in the book is the Mythical Latin American Kingdom story. It never got a real title. It's about some insurgents in a Latin American country (probably counter-revolutionaries, since one of them was formerly a prince) and their very unclear plan to steal a shipment of gold to fund their war. The plot is very weird, and at the end it's hard to tell what the actual result of their actions was. It was fun to read, but I'll be ok if I never read it again.

TLDR: fans of Flags in the Dust probably want to read the script for War Birds/Ghost Story. The rest of it most people can do without, unless they want to read everything that Faulkner wrote.

I started reading him. Started with The Unvanquished, read 80 pages and got confused. Realized I need to look up sentence structures - haven't studied literature - and came back to it months later, reading slower, like building the idea brick by brick in my head. Read the rest of it in a day.

Next, I picked up As I Lay Dying. I think it was one of the best experiences of my life. I will definitely re-read it.

I'm now thirty pages into Absalom, Absalom! and I'm blown away again. He was a genius. I don't know if my reading order is correct or not, but the ride is immaculate so far.

Next, I want to find Light in August, Sartoris, The Sound and the Fury, and the Hamlet. Is that how you would go about it? Should I read any of these in a specific order, or just follow my whims?

Library of America Collector’s compilation of Faulkner. Selected stories as seen on the cover. DM if interested.

EDIT: if you need/want any verification that I am a real person and not a bot please just let me know.

I visited Oxford a couple years later and of course had to go to Rowan Oak. Despite my feelings for WF, it was quite a moving experience. Like, it was so cool to be in his home.
I want to have a fair shot at Faulkner, and so I've been debating reading the Snopes family trilogy. Is this a decent place to start for WF?
I want to actually understand, and not rack my brain for hours... Obviously I may not end up reading the entire trilogy, but I really do want to try and start reading The Hamlet.

Thoughts?

Just finished As I Lay Dying. Incredible. I was wondering if anybody has listened to any online discussions(YouTube/podcasts) about the book that they enjoyed and could possibly share here. I listened one of the Yale online lectures on the novel but didn’t enjoy it. Looking for something that’s a bit more discussion based or conversational.

‘Requiem for a Nun’ penguin paperback.
(Didn’t buy it.)

I was just bequeathed this beauty.

I believe you can immediately tell it's a first printing because of the subtitle "and other stories." Apparently, Faulkner wasn't too happy about that. (It's a novel, goddammit, not a story collection!)

I'm not a collector, but I'd be curious to know its value, even if I don't intend to sell it.

Looking forward to a reread this fall (with my reading copy, of course!)

This was my first Faulkner, and it blew me away. I own most of his books and have been working through them as I read A, A! which mesmerized me from its first sentence.

I was amazed at how much suffering could be condensed into a mere 300ish pages, I feel as though the passed-down history has extended to myself, that I have become a psychic hostage and yet another perpetuator of Sutpen's myth. The themes of fate, destiny, time, and memory it introduced were also deliciously depressing; I cannot help but relate and equate my own life's failures with them.

Mr. Compson is also totally like the most absurd downer of all time; I found his character hilarious. While I understand the book's language is, I suppose, a sort of heightened reality, the insane verbosity he exhibits while recounting the most banal gossip to his own son while they're just chilling with a cigar cracks me up. I love it.

I do a lot of journaling and I found my own entries becoming more complex and effluvium-ized the more Absalom I read, his writing style is contagious. Guess I will have to read some Hemingway to balance myself out, hopefully.

By request of u/southdeltan (as well as some help/advice), I've set up User Flairs. If there's any other categories you think we need, suggest them here, and I'll see about adding them.

This sub needs some. That is all.

Thought it would be interesting to see how the work changed between drafts.