Collected Stories
Failed to add items
Add to basket failed.
Add to wishlist failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
Get 30 days of Standard free
Collected Stories
Buy Now for £23.28
-
Narrated by:
-
Various
-
By:
-
William Faulkner
About this listen
“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. And failing that, only then does he take up novel writing.” —William Faulkner
Winner of the National Book Award
Forty-two stories make up this magisterial collection by the writer who stands at the pinnacle of modern American fiction. Compressing an epic expanse of vision into hard and wounding narratives, Faulkner’s stories evoke the intimate textures of place, the deep strata of history and legend, and all the fear, brutality, and tenderness of the human condition. 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, as well as by ordinary men and women who emerge so sharply and indelibly in these pages that they dwarf the protagonists of most novels.
Critic reviews
“For all his concern with the South, Faulkner was actually seeking out the nature of man. Thus we must turn to him for that continuity of moral purpose which made for greatness of our classics.” —Ralph Ellison
Great Story's - dated
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
The narrators are everything I could wish for - and I give a special mention to Arthur Morey. His voice is simply magical.
Wonderrful voices
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
What did you like most about Collected Stories of William Faulkner?
Its variety across Faulkner's many styles and genres.What did you like best about this story?
See below.What about the narrators’s performance did you like?
There were a number of narrators and they each caught the variety in Faulkner's writing.If you made a film of this book, what would be the tag line be?
N/AAny additional comments?
An apparently casual observation (because it is hardly a sentence) from “Elly” (1934) catches something of how Faulkner writes. Elly, in bed with one of her many lovers, without any relationships apparently being “consummated”, describes herself as “already fled without moving” (“Elly”, 1934). Or at least this is probably typical of how Faulkner has his characters inhabit a present which is never only the present, though the past is more likely to figure in a character’s present than the future. Yet, Faulkner writes in many styles and even genres in this collection of forty or so stories. "A Rose for Emily" (1930) is both Southern gothic and sociology of a Southern town, albeit at the very edges of everyday life. "Centaur" (1932) shows Faulkner conveying a very un-aristocratic South in this episode in the rise of a member of the Snopes family. And then there is the truly shocking story of race in the South, "Dry September" (1931), which is told in a resigned, un-melodramatic way, at the other end of the spectrum from the gothic, in spite of its core of terror. Faulkner moves easily from the high rhetoric of "Centaur" to Hemingway-like hard-boiled in "Death Drag (1932).While I prefer Faulkner’s greatest novels to his greatest short stories – and this collection includes all of those – his stories read like parts of something on-going, while a novel like “Go Down Moses” gains from the discontinuities that occur when something seems to end.
“Already fled without moving”
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Lazy lazy Audible
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.