Gavin Stevens, the wise student of crime and folkways of Mississippi's Yoknapatawpha county, plays the major role in these six stories of violence.

This book offers the first full-length study of the chess structures, motifs, and imagery in William Faulkner's Knight's Gambit . Wainwright looks at the importance of chess as a literary device and examines the structural analogy drawn between the game and linguistics by Ferdinand de Saussure.