The Unvanquished (28 page)

COLLECTED STORIES

‘A Bear Hunt,’ ‘A Rose for Emily,’ ‘Two Soldiers,’ ‘Victory,’ ‘The Brooch,’ ‘Beyond’—these are among the forty-two stories that make up this magisterial collection by the writer who stands at the pinnacle of modern American fiction. Compressing an epic expanse of vision into narratives as hard and wounding as bullets, William Faulkner’s stories evoke the intimate textures of place, the deep strata of history and legend, and all the fear, brutality, and tenderness of which human beings are capable. 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 (‘A Justice’) as well as ordinary men and women who emerge in these pages so sharply and indelibly that they dwarf the protagonists of most novels.

GO DOWN, MOSES

Go Down, Moses
is composed of seven interrelated stories, all of them set in Faulkner’s mythic Yoknapatawpha County. From a variety of perspectives, Faulkner examines the complex, changing relationships between blacks and whites, between man and nature, weaving a cohesive novel rich in implication and insight.

INTRUDER IN THE DUST

Intruder in the Dust
is at once engrossing murder mystery and unflinching portrait of racial injustice: it is the story of Lucas Beauchamp, a black man wrongly arrested for the murder of Vinson Gowrie, a white man. Confronted by the threat of lynching, Lucas sets out to prove his innocence, aided by a white lawyer, Gavin Stevens, and his young nephew, Chick Mallison.

KNIGHT’S GAMBIT

Gavin Stevens, the wise and forbearing student of crime and the folk ways of Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, plays the major role in these six stories of violence. In each, Stevens’ sharp insights and ingenious detection uncover the underlying motives.

PYLON

One of the few of William Faulkner’s works to be set outside his fictional Yoknapatawpha County,
Pylon
, first published in 1935, takes place at an air show in a thinly disguised New Orleans named New Valois. An unnamed reporter for a local newspaper tries to understand a very modern
ménage a trois
of flyers on the brainstorming circuit. These characters, Faulkner said, ‘were a fantastic and bizarre phenomenon on the face of the contemporary scene.… That is, there was really no place for them in the culture, in the economy, yet they were there, at that time, and everyone knew that they wouldn’t last very long, which they didn’t.… That they were outside the range of God, not only of respectability, of love, but of God too.’ In
Pylon
Faulkner set out to test their rootless modernity to see if there is any place in it for the old values of the human heart that are the central concerns of his best fiction.

SANCTUARY

A powerful novel examining the nature of evil, informed by the works of T.S. Eliot and Freud, mythology, local lore, and hardboiled detective fiction,
Sanctuary
is the dark, at times brutal, story of the kidnapping of Mississippi debutante Temple Drake, who introduces her own form of venality into the Memphis underworld where she is being held.

THREE FAMOUS SHORT NOVELS

In this book are three different approaches of Faulkner, each of them highly entertaining as well as representative of his work as a whole.
Spotted Horses
is a hilarious account of a horse auction, and pits the ‘cold practicality’ of women against the boyish folly of men. The law comes in to settle the dispute caused by the sale of ‘wild’ horses, and finds itself up against a formidable opponent, Mrs. Tull.
Old Man
is something of an adventure story. When a flood ravages the countryside of the lower Mississippi, a convict finds himself adrift with a pregnant woman. His one aim is to return the woman to safety and himself to prison, where he can be free of women. In order to do this, he fights alligators and snakes, as well as the urge to be trapped once again by a woman. Perhaps one of the best known of Faulkner’s shorter works,
The Bear
is the story of a boy coming to terms with the adult world. By learning how to hunt, the boy is taught the real meaning of pride and humility and courage, virtues that Faulkner feared would be almost impossible to learn with the destruction of the wilderness.

UNCOLLECTED STORIES OF WILLIAM FAULKNER

This invaluable volume, which has been republished to commemorate the one-hundredth anniversary of Faulkner’s birth, contains some of the greatest short fiction by a writer who defined the course of American literature. Its forty-five stories fall into three categories: those not included in Faulkner’s earlier collections; previously unpublished short fiction; and stories that were later expanded into such novels as
The Unvanquished, The Hamlet
, and
Go Down, Moses
. With its introduction and extensive notes by the biographer Joseph Blotner,
Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner
is an essential addition to its author’s canon—as well as a book of some of the most haunting, harrowing, and atmospheric short fiction written in this century.

THE WILD PALMS

In this feverishly beautiful novel—originally titled
If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem
by Faulkner, and now published in the authoritative Library of America text—William Faulkner interweaves two narratives, each wholly absorbing in its own right, each subtly illuminating the other. In New Orleans in 1937, a man and a woman embark on a headlong flight into the wilderness of passions, fleeing her husband and the temptations of respectability. In Mississippi ten years earlier, a convict sets forth across a flooded river, risking his one chance at freedom to rescue a pregnant woman. From these separate stories Faulkner composes a symphony of deliverance and damnation, survival and self-sacrifice, a novel in which elemental danger juxtaposes with fatal injuries of the spirit.
The Wild Palms
is grandly inventive, heart-stopping in its prose, and suffused on every page with the physical presence of the country that Faulkner made his own.

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