Our list of some of the best William Faulkner books & series in recent years. Get inspired by one or more of the following books.
- As I Lay Dying: The Corrected Text (1991)
- A Summer of Faulkner: As I Lay Dying/The Sound and the Fury/Light in August (Oprah’s Book Club) (2005)
- Collected Stories of William Faulkner (1995)
- Absalom, Absalom! The Corrected Text (1991)
- The Sound and the Fury: The Corrected Text (1991)
- Sanctuary: The Corrected Text (1993)
- Light in August (1991)
- Go Down, Moses (1991)
- The Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner (1997)
- A Fable (Vintage International) (2011)
- The Wild Palms (1995)
- The Reivers (1992)
As I Lay Dying: The Corrected Text (1991)
“I set out deliberately to write a tour-de-force. Before I ever put pen to paper and set down the first word I knew what the last word would be and almost where the last period would fall.” —William Faulkner on As I Lay Dying As I Lay Dying is Faulkner’s harrowing account of the Bundren family’s odyssey across the Mississippi countryside to bury Addie, their wife and mother.
A Summer of Faulkner: As I Lay Dying/The Sound and the Fury/Light in August (Oprah’s Book Club) (2005)
This novel is the harrowing account of the Bundren family’s odyssey across the Mississippi countryside to bury Addie, their wife and mother. Told in turns by each of the family members–including Addie herself–the novel ranges in mood from dark comedy to the deepest pathos. Originally published in 1930.
Collected Stories of William Faulkner (1995)
“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.
Absalom, Absalom! The Corrected Text (1991)
“Read, read, read. Read everything—trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out the window.” —William Faulkner Absalom, Absalom!
The Sound and the Fury: The Corrected Text (1991)
The Sound and the Fury is the tragedy of the Compson family, featuring some of the most memorable characters in literature: beautiful, rebellious Caddy; the manchild Benjy; haunted, neurotic Quentin; Jason, the brutal cynic; and Dilsey, their black servant.
Sanctuary: The Corrected Text (1993)
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.
Light in August (1991)
“Read, read, read. Read everything—trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you’ll find out.
Go Down, Moses (1991)
“I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.” —William Faulkner, on receiving the Nobel Prize Go Down, Moses is composed of seven interrelated stories, all of them set in Faulkner’s mythic Yoknapatawpha County.
The Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner (1997)
This invaluable volume 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.
A Fable (Vintage International) (2011)
This novel won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1955. An allegorical story of World War I, set in the trenches in France and dealing ostensibly with a mutiny in a French regiment, it was originally considered a sharp departure for Faulkner.
The Wild Palms (1995)
In this feverishly beautiful novel—originally titled If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem—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 illicit passion, fleeing her husband and the temptations of respectability.
The Reivers (1992)
One of Faulkner’s comic masterpieces, The Reivers is a picaresque that tells of three unlikely car thieves from rural Mississippi. Eleven-year-old Lucius Priest is persuaded by Boon Hogganbeck, one of his family’s retainers, to steal his grandfather’s car and make a trip to Memphis.
Best William Faulkner Books That You Need
We highly recommend you to buy all paper or e-books in a legal way, for example, on Amazon. But sometimes it might be a need to dig deeper beyond the shiny book cover. Before making a purchase, you can visit resources like Library Genesis and download some william faulkner books mentioned below at your own risk. Once again, we do not host any illegal or copyrighted files, but simply give our visitors a choice and hope they will make a wise decision.
The New William Faulkner Studies
Author(s): Sarah Gleeson-White, Pardis Dabashi
ID: 3644781, Publisher: Cambridge University Press, Year: 2022, Size: 1 Mb, Format: pdf
William Faulkner: From Jefferson to the World
Author(s): Hyatt H. Waggoner
ID: 3382674, Publisher: UP of Kentucky, Year: 2021, Size: 859 Kb, Format: epub
A Study of Place in Short Fiction by James Joyce, William Faulkner and Sherwood Anderson
Author(s): Abd Alkareem Atteh
ID: 3513938, Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Year: 2021, Size: 1 Mb, Format: pdf
Please note that this booklist is not definite. Some books are really record-breakers according to Washington Post, others are drafted by unknown authors. On top of that, you can always find additional tutorials and courses on Coursera, Udemy or edX, for example. Are there any other relevant resources you could recommend? Drop a comment if you have any feedback on the list.