This volume guides readers through one of William Faulkner's most complex novels. By common consent The Sound and the Fury is a seminal document of twentieth-century literature. Almost from the beginning it has been a litmus test for critical approaches -- from New Criticism to biography and manuscript analysis. In the past two decades nearly all of the newest critical theories have come calling -- deconstruction and new historicism, as well as culture, gender, and race studies.Yet the novel resists or evades even the most ardent theorists' efforts to contain it, and much of its total accomplishment remains unplumbed. Many of its smaller parts are still mysteries, and the novel remains a formidable challenge not just for beginners but for more sophisticated readers as well.This volume, like others in the Reading Faulkner series, provides line-by-line interpretation, concentrating on individual words and sentences, visual dimensions, time shifts, intricacies of narration, and other obscurities. It explores Faulkner's words as they appear on the page, deciphering an responding to them in their linear progression and in their cumulating resonances inside and outside the text. Important allusions and references are identified, as are dates and historical personages. For many passages alternative readings are offered. The pagination is keyed to the definitive text of the Vintage edition.

A handbook for interpreting Faulkner's great novel

This Guide explores the wealth of critical material generated by these two exceptional works of modernist fiction. From the initially mixed critical responses to the novels in the early 1930s, the Guide follows the enormous growth of interest in Faulkner's work across six decades. New writings shaped by a range of critical theories are discussed, offering the reader a clear view of the place now given to one of America's most innovative and influential novelists.

Willa Cather was the 1922 winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Her breakthrough in literature were the three novels featured here in this edition, the so-called “Great Plains Trilogy”. All three novels stage in Nebraska and the surrounding Great Plains territory and deal with the life there, family challenges and romance. Included are: O Pioneers! The Song of the Lark My Antonia

A vibrant, intimate, hypnotic portrait of one woman's life, from an important new writer Tess Lohan is the kind of woman that we meet and fail to notice every day. A single mother. A nurse. A quiet woman, who nonetheless feels things acutely—a woman with tumultuous emotions and few people to share them with. Academy Street is Mary Costello's luminous portrait of a whole life. It follows Tess from her girlhood in western Ireland through her relocation to America and her life there, concluding with a moving reencounter with her Irish family after forty years of exile. The novel has a hypnotic pull and a steadily mounting emotional force. It speaks of disappointments but also of great joy. It shows how the signal events of the last half century affect the course of a life lived in New York City. Anne Enright has said that Costello's first collection of stories, The China Factory, "has the feel of work that refused to be abandoned; of stories that were written for the sake of getting something important right . . . Her writing has the kind of urgency that the great problems demand" (The Guardian). Academy Street is driven by this same urgency. In sentence after sentence it captures the rhythm and intensity of inner life.

A beautifully illustrated children’s book unlike any other—a tender and atmospheric tale written by William Faulkner as a present for his future stepdaughter “If you are kind to helpless things, you don’t need a Wishing Tree to make things come true.” A strange boy leads a birthday girl and her companions on a hunt for the wishing tree, which brings them many surprising and magical adventures. Written in 1927 and eventually published in 1964 as a limited edition featuring Don Bolognese’s striking illustrations, The Wishing Tree reveals another side to a visionary of American letters, making it a welcome gift to children and to all readers of Faulkner.