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”

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.

“You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.” —William Faulkner These short works offer three different approaches to Faulkner, each 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. 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. And The Bear, perhaps his best known shorter work, is the story of a boy’s coming to terms wit the adult world. By learning how to hunt, the boy is taught the real meaning of pride, humility, and courage.

When Chief Issetibbeha dies, custom requires that the Chickasaw leader’s worldly possessions be buried with him. This includes his servant, who makes a desperate bid for his life in this early William Faulkner short story. Although primarily known for his novels, Faulkner wrote in a variety of formats, including plays, poetry, essays, screenplays, and short stories, many of which are highly acclaimed and anthologized. Like his novels, many of Faulkner’s short stories are set in fictional Yoknapatawapha County, a setting inspired by Lafayette County, where Faulkner spent most of his life. His first short story collection, These 13 (1931), includes many of his most frequently anthologized stories, including "A Rose for Emily", "Red Leaves" and "That Evening Sun." HarperCollins brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in ebook production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperCollins short-stories collection to build your digital library.

A New York Times Notable Book of 2020 How do we read William Faulkner in the twenty-first century? asks Michael Gorra, in this reconsideration of Faulkner's life and legacy. William Faulkner, one of America’s most iconic writers, is an author who defies easy interpretation. Born in 1897 in Mississippi, Faulkner wrote such classic novels as Absolom, Absolom! and The Sound and The Fury, creating in Yoknapatawpha county one of the most memorable gallery of characters ever assembled in American literature. Yet, as acclaimed literary critic Michael Gorra explains, Faulkner has sustained justified criticism for his failures of racial nuance—his ventriloquism of black characters and his rendering of race relations in a largely unreconstructed South—demanding that we reevaluate the Nobel laureate’s life and legacy in the twenty-first century, as we reexamine the junctures of race and literature in works that once rested firmly in the American canon. Interweaving biography, literary criticism, and rich travelogue, The Saddest Words argues that even despite these contradictions—and perhaps because of them—William Faulkner still needs to be read, and even more, remains central to understanding the contradictions inherent in the American experience itself. Evoking Faulkner’s biography and his literary characters, Gorra illuminates what Faulkner maintained was “the South’s curse and its separate destiny,” a class and racial system built on slavery that was devastated during the Civil War and was reimagined thereafter through the South’s revanchism. Driven by currents of violence, a “Lost Cause” romanticism not only defined Faulkner’s twentieth century but now even our own age. Through Gorra’s critical lens, Faulkner’s mythic Yoknapatawpha County comes alive as his imagined land finds itself entwined in America’s history, the characters wrestling with the ghosts of a past that refuses to stay buried, stuck in an unending cycle between those two saddest words, “was” and “again.” Upending previous critical traditions, The Saddest Words returns Faulkner to his sociopolitical context, revealing the civil war within him and proving that “the real war lies not only in the physical combat, but also in the war after the war, the war over its memory and meaning.” Filled with vignettes of Civil War battles and generals, vivid scenes from Gorra’s travels through the South—including Faulkner’s Oxford, Mississippi—and commentaries on Faulkner’s fiction, The Saddest Words is a mesmerizing work of literary thought that recontextualizes Faulkner in light of the most plangent cultural issues facing America today.

Isaac McCaslin is obsessed with hunting down Old Ben, a mythical bear that wreaks havoc on the forest. After this feat is accomplished, Isaac struggles with his relationship to nature and to the land, which is complicated when he inherits a large plantation in Yoknapatawapha County. “The Bear” is included in William Faulkner’s novel, Go Down, Moses. Although primarily known for his novels, Faulkner wrote in a variety of formats, including plays, poetry, essays, screenplays, and short stories, many of which are highly acclaimed and anthologized. Like his novels, many of Faulkner’s short stories are set in fictional Yoknapatawapha County, a setting inspired by Lafayette County, where Faulkner spent most of his life. His first short story collection, These 13 (1931), includes many of his most frequently anthologized stories, including "A Rose for Emily", "Red Leaves" and "That Evening Sun." HarperCollins brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in ebook production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperCollins short-stories collection to build your digital library.

“Will leave you feeling happier, bolder, and ridiculously excited about diving back into your writing projects.” —Chris Baty, author of No Plot? No Problem! and founder of NaNoWriMo Every writer knows that as rewarding as the creative process is, it can often be a bumpy road. Have hope and keep at it! Designed to kick-start creativity, this handbook from the executive director of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) gathers a wide range of insights and advice for writers at any stage of their career. From tips about how to finally start that story to helpful ideas about what to do when the words just aren’t quite coming out right, Pep Talks for Writers provides motivation, encouragement, and helpful exercises for writers of all stripes.

A scholarly examination of the scripts and fiction Faulkner created during his foray as a Hollywood screenwriter. During more than two decades (1932-1954), William Faulkner worked on approximately fifty screenplays for major Hollywood studios and was credited on such classics as The Big Sleep and To Have and Have Not. Faulkner’s film scripts—and later television scripts—constitute an extensive and, until now, thoroughly underexplored archival source. Stefan Solomon analyzes the majority of these scripts and also compares them to the fiction Faulkner was writing concurrently. His aim: to reconcile two aspects of a career that were not as distinct as they first might seem: Faulkner the screenwriter and Faulkner the modernist, Nobel Prize–winning author. As Solomon shows Faulkner adjusting to the idiosyncrasies of the screen­writing process (a craft he never favored or admired), he offers insights into Faulkner’s compositional practice, thematic preoccupations, and understanding of both cinema and television. In the midst of this complex exchange of media and genres, much of Faulkner’s fiction of the 1930s and 1940s was directly influenced by his protracted engagement with the film industry. Solomon helps us to see a corpus integrating two vastly different modes of writing and a restless author. Faulkner was never only the southern novelist or the West Coast “hack writer” but always both at once. Solomon’s study shows that Faulkner’s screenplays are crucial in any consideration of his far more esteemed fiction—and that the two forms of writing are more porous and intertwined than the author himself would have us believe. Here is a major American writer seen in a remarkably new way.