William Faulkner once called the short story -the most demanding form after poetry.- In that form, he achieved splendid success. He wrote over a hundred short stories, published nearly all of them during his lifetime, and has become one of the most frequently anthologized writers in the genre. Countless readers of Faulkner have first entered his world through one of the forty-two doors in Collected Stories.

Reading Faulkner: Collected Stories attempts to make the process of reading America's major modern writer less daunting. It is a useful guide to Faulkner's allusions,...

Absalom, Absalom has long been regarded as one of William Faulkner's most difficult, dense, and multilayered novels. It is, on one level, the story of Thomas Sutpen, an enigmatic stranger who came to Jefferson 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.- On another level, the book narrates the tragedy that befalls the entire Sutpen family and that tragedy's legacy that continues well into the twentieth century and beyond. The novel's intricate,...

Absalom, Absalom has long been regarded as one of William Faulkner's most difficult, dense, and multilayered novels. It is, on one level, the story of Thomas Sutpen, an enigmatic stranger who came to Jefferson 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.- On another level, the book narrates the tragedy that befalls the entire Sutpen family and that tragedy's legacy that continues well into the twentieth century and beyond. The novel's intricate,...