New Releases by William Faulkner

In this book, an unnamed reporter for a local newspaper, tries to understand a trio of flyers on the barnstorming circuit.

The Reivers: A Reminiscence, published in 1962, is the last novel by the American author William Faulkner. The bestselling novel was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1963. Faulkner previously won this award for his book A Fable, making him one of only four authors to be awarded it more than once. Unlike many of his earlier works, it is a straightforward narration and eschews the complicated literary techniques of his more well known works. It is a picaresque novel, and as such may seem uncharacteristically lighthearted given its subject matter. For these reasons, The Reivers is often ignored by Faulkner scholars or dismissed as a lesser work. In the early 20th century, an 11-year-old boy named Lucius Priest (a distant cousin of the McCaslin/Edmonds family Faulkner wrote about in Go Down, Moses) somewhat unwittingly gets embroiled in a plot to go to Memphis with dimwitted family friend and manservant Boon Hogganbeck. Boon steals (reives, thereby becoming a reiver) Lucius'' grandfather''s car, one of the first cars in Yoknapatawpha County. They discover that Ned McCaslin, a black man who works with Boon at Lucius'' grandfather''s stables, has stowed away with them (Ned is also a blood cousin of the Priests). When they reach Memphis, Boon and Lucius stay in a boarding-house (brothel). Miss Reba, the madam, and Miss Corrie, Boon''s favorite girl, are appalled to see that Boon has brought a child. In fact, Corrie''s nephew Otis, an ill-mannered and off-putting boy about Lucius'' age, is already staying there. In the evening, Otis reveals that Corrie (whose real name is Everbe Corinthia) used to prostitute herself in their old town, and he would charge men to watch her through a peephole. Outraged at his conduct, Lucius fights Otis, who cuts his hand with a pocketknife. Boon breaks up the fight but Everbe is so moved by Lucius'' chivalry that she decides to stop whoring. Later, Ned returns to the boarding-house and reveals he traded the car for a supposedly lame racehorse. Corrie, Reba, Ned, Boon and Lucius hatch a scheme to smuggle the horse by rail to a nearby town, Parsham, to race a horse it has lost to twice already. Ned figures that everyone in town will bet against the horse and he can win enough money to buy back the car; he claims to have a secret ability to make the horse run. Corrie uses another client who works for the railroad, Sam, to get them and the horse on a night train. In town, Ned takes Lucius to stay with a black family while they practice for the horse race. Unfortunately, the local lawman named Butch finds them out and attempts to extort sexual favors from Corrie to look the other way. Reba is able to send him away by claiming she will reveal to the town that he intentionally ordered two prostitutes, angering his constituency.

From February to June of 1957 and 1958, William Faulkner was Writer-in-Residence at the University of Virginia under a grant from the Emily Clark Balch Fund for American Literature. Mr. Faulkner held thirty-seven group conferences and an uncounted number of individual office meetings with students and staff of the University. He encouraged groups to ask questions about his writing and indeed about anything, which resulted in his answering publicly over two thousand queries on everything from spelling to the nature of man. - Preface.

Includes Spotted Horses, Old Man, and The Bear.

Intruder in the Dust is a novel about an African American farmer accused of murdering a Caucasian man. Nobel Prize-winning American author William Faulkner published it in 1948. The novel focuses on Lucas Beauchamp, a black farmer accused of murdering a white man. He is exonerated through the efforts of black and white teenagers and a spinster from a long-established Southern family. It was written as Faulkner''s response as a Southern writer to the racial problems facing the South.[citation needed] Intruder in the Dust is notable for its use of stream of consciousness style of narration. The novel also includes lengthy passages on the Southern memory of the Civil War, one of which Shelby Foote quoted in Ken Burns'' documentary The Civil War. The characters of Lucas Beauchamp and his wife, Molly, first appeared in Faulkner''s collection of short fiction, Go Down, Moses. A story by Faulkner, "Lucas Beauchamp," was published in 1999. Intruder in the Dust was turned into a film of the same name directed by Clarence Brown in 1949 after MGM paid film rights of $50,000 to Faulkner. The film was shot in Faulkner''s home town of Oxford, Mississippi.

Absalom (Hebrew mean "father of peace") was the third son of David, King of Israel with Maacah, daughter of Talmai, King of Geshur. Absalom, Absalom! details the rise and fall of Thomas Sutpen, a white man born into poverty in western Virginia who moves to Mississippi with the dual aims of gaining wealth and becoming a powerful family patriarch. The story is told entirely in flashbacks narrated mostly by Quentin Compson to his roommate at Harvard College, Shreve, who frequently contributes his own suggestions and surmises. The narration of Rosa Coldfield, and Quentin''s father and grandfather, are also included and re-interpreted by Shreve and Quentin, with the total events of the story unfolding in nonchronological order and often with differing details. This results in a peeling-back-the-onion revelation of the true story of the Sutpens. Rosa initially narrates the story, with long digressions and a biased memory, to Quentin Compson, whose grandfather was a friend of Sutpen''s. Quentin''s father then fills in some of the details to Quentin. Finally, Quentin relates the story to his roommate Shreve, and in each retelling, the reader receives more details as the parties flesh out the story by adding layers. The final effect leaves the reader more certain about the attitudes and biases of the characters than about the facts of Sutpen''s story. Thomas Sutpen arrives in Jefferson, Mississippi, with some slaves and a French architect who has been somehow forced into working for him. Sutpen obtains one hundred square miles of land from a local Native American tribe and immediately begins building a large plantation called Sutpen''s Hundred, including an ostentatious mansion. All he needs to complete his plan is a wife to bear him a few children (particularly a son to be his heir), so he ingratiates himself with a local merchant and marries the man''s daughter, Ellen Coldfield. Ellen bears Sutpen two children, a son named Henry and a daughter named Judith, both of whom are destined for tragedy. Henry goes to the University of Mississippi and meets fellow student Charles Bon, who is ten years his senior. Henry brings Charles home for Christmas, and Charles and Judith begin a quiet romance that leads to a presumed engagement. However, Thomas Sutpen realizes that Charles Bon is his son from an earlier marriage and moves to stop the proposed union. Sutpen had worked on a plantation in the French West Indies as overseer and, after subduing a slave uprising, was offered the hand of the plantation owner''s daughter, Eulalia Bon. She bore him a son, Charles. Sutpen did not know that Eulalia was of mixed race until after the marriage and birth of Charles, but when he discovered that he had been deceived, he renounced the marriage as void and left his wife and child (though leaving them his fortune as part of his own moral recompense). The reader also later learns of Sutpen''s childhood, when young Thomas learned that society could base human worth on material worth. It is this episode that sets into motion Thomas'' plan to start a dynasty.