For readers and critics, a guide to the Nobel Laureate's short stories

For readers and critics, a guide to the Nobel Laureate's short stories

Reading Faulkner's Best Short Stories provides readers with an introduction to Faulkner as a short story writer and offers close readings of twelve of his best short stories selected on the basis of literary quality as representatives of his most successful achievements within the genre.

From the Modern Library’s new set of beautifully repackaged hardcover classics by William Faulkner—also available are Snopes, As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom! William Faulkner was a master of the short story. Most of the pieces in this collection are drawn from the greatest period in his writing life, the fifteen or so years beginning in 1929, when he published The Sound and the Fury. They explore many of the themes found in the novels and feature characters of small-town Mississippi life that are uniquely Faulkner’s. In “A Rose for Emily,” the first of his stories to appear in a national magazine, a straightforward, neighborly narrator relates a tale of love, betrayal, and murder. The vicious family of the Snopes trilogy turns up in “Barn Burning,” about a son’s response to the activities of his arsonist father. And Jason and Caddy Compson, two other inhabitants of Faulkner’s mythical Yoknapatawpha County, are witnesses to the terrorizing of a pregnant black laundress in “That Evening Sun.” These and the other stories gathered here attest to the fact that Faulkner is, as Ralph Ellison so aptly noted, “the greatest artist the South has produced.” Including these stories: “Barn Burning” “Two Soldiers” “A Rose for Emily” “Dry September” “That Evening Sun” “Red Leaves” “Lo!” “Turnabout” “Honor” “There Was a Queen” “Mountain Victory” “Beyond” “Race at Morning”

Faulkner was a master of the short story. Most of the stories in this collection are drawn from the greatest period in his writing life, the fifteen or so years beginning in 1929, when he published The Sound and the Fury. They deal with many of the themes found in the novels and with the subjects and characters of small-town Mississippi life that are uniquely Faulkner's. In "A Rose for Emily", the first of his stories to appear in a national magazine, a straightforward, neighborly narrator relates a tale of love, betrayal, murder, and implied necrophilia. The vicious Snopes family of The Hamlet trilogy turns up in "Barn Burning" (1938), about a son's response to the activities of his arsonist father. Other inhabitants of Yoknapatawpha County appearing here include Jason and Caddy Compson, childish witnesses to the terror of the pregnant black laundress in "That Evening Sun" (1930), who fears that her lover will murder her.

“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 Reader's Guide is a companion to Edmond L. Volpe's Reader's Guide to William Faulkner: The Novels, the most complete guide to the novels of Faulkner and hailed by critics as "a book to be read, studied, and returned to often:' The new Guide—the first comprehensive book of its kind—offers analyses of all Faulkner's short stories, published and unpublished, that were not incorporated into novels or turned into chapters of a novel. Each of the seventy-one stories receives separate and detailed appraisal. This exacting approach helps establish the relationship of the stories to the novels and underscores Faulkner's formidable skill as a writer of short fiction. Although Faulkner often spoke disparagingly of the short story form and claimed that he wrote stories for money—which he did—Edmond L. Volpe's study reveals that Faulkner could not resist the application of his incomparable creative imagination or his mastery of narrative structure and technique to this genre.