Collected Stories of William Faulkner

by William Faulkner

“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 AwardForty-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.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Classics, Literature, American, Southern Gothic, Southern

908 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1950

About the author

William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer. He is best known for his novels and short stories set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, a stand-in for Lafayette County where he spent most of his life. A Nobel laureate, Faulkner is one of the most celebrated writers of American literature and often is considered the greatest writer of Southern literature.
Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi, and raised in Oxford, Mississippi. During World War I, he joined the Royal Canadian Air Force, but did not serve in combat. Returning to Oxford, he attended the University of Mississippi for three semesters before dropping out. He moved to New Orleans, where he wrote his first novel Soldiers' Pay (1925). He went back to Oxford and wrote Sartoris (1927), his first work set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County. In 1929, he published The Sound and the Fury. The following year, he wrote As I Lay Dying. Later that decade, he wrote Light in August, Absalom, Absalom! and The Wild Palms. He also worked as a screenwriter, contributing to Howard Hawks's To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep, adapted from Raymond Chandler's novel. The former film, adapted from Ernest Hemingway's novel, is the only film with contributions by two Nobel laureates.
Faulkner's reputation grew following publication of Malcolm Cowley's The Portable Faulkner, and he was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature for "his powerful and unique contribution to the modern American novel." He is the only Mississippi-born Nobel laureate. Two of his works, A Fable (1954) and The Reivers (1962), won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Faulkner died from a heart attack on July 6, 1962, following a fall from his horse the month before. Ralph Ellison called him "the greatest artist the South has produced".

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

So many dissimilar subjects… So many divergent themes… The spectrum of William Faulkner’s short stories is incredible…
Many stories have an odd flavour of jocular anecdotes as in Shingles for the Lord… A simple job of replacing the shingles on the church ends up in an unbelievable pandemonium…  

They went to work then, splitting the cuts into bolts and riving the bolts into shingles for Tull and Snopes and the others that had promised for tomorrow to start nailing onto the church roof when they finished pulling the old shingles off. They set flat on the ground in a kind of circle, with their legs spraddled out on either side of the propped-up bolt, Solon and Homer working light and easy and steady as two clocks ticking, but pap making every lick of hisn like he was killing a moccasin.

Yarns of sins… Gothic tales… Family dramas… Misfortune and tragedy… Stories of misery, stupidity, obstinacy and ignorance… Destinies crippled by the First World War as in the bleak tale Victory… 

Then they hear a sound, a short, guttural word. Not ten yards away and behind a ruined wall leveled breast-high and facing the bridge, four men squat about a machine gun. The captain raises his hand again. They grasp their rifles: a rush of hobnails on cobblestones, a cry of astonishment cut sharply off; blows, short, hard breaths, curses; not a shot.
The man with the bandaged head begins to laugh, shrilly, until someone hushes him with a hand that tastes like brass. Under the captain’s direction they bash in the door of the house and drag the gun and the four bodies into it. They hoist the gun upstairs and set it up in a window looking down upon the bridgehead.

Natives… Slavery… A long echo of the Civil War… Violence… Ruination…

Sutpen returned in 1865, on the black stallion. He seemed to have aged ten years. His son had been killed in action the same winter in which his wife had died. He returned with his citation for gallantry from the hand of General Lee to a ruined plantation, where for a year now his daughter had subsisted partially on the meager bounty of the man to whom fifteen years ago he had granted permission to live in that tumbledown fishing camp whose very existence he had at the time forgotten.

The world is wide and the number of different fates is beyond imagination.

[Lyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

First published in 1950 (winning the National Book Award in 1951) this is a collection of 42 short works and more than anything else, demonstrates the Nobel prize winner’s great range of emotion and theme.

Divided into six categories: The Country, The Village, The Wilderness, The Wasteland, The Middle Ground and Beyond. The Country and The Village describe events in Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County. The Wilderness also fits into this world building but focuses on Doom, a Chickasaw chief in the 1800s (his title is “Du Homme” given to him by a New Orleans Frenchman and then called Doom, a corrupt pronunciation of Du Homme – The Man, as he is the chief, his real name is Ikkemotubbe. Doom appears in all four of these stories but also can be seen in about a dozen of Faulkner’s works, mostly significant as a connection to Sam Fathers, but also likely the chief who sold land to the Compsons and Sutpen.

The Wasteland features some of Faulkner’s World War I stories, while the Middle Ground returns to Yoknapatawpha County but later in time, in the 1940s and later. Beyond is noteworthy for stories with a supernatural or even occult theme, which is somewhat surprising considering Faulkner’s more recognized works.

While this includes several of Faulkner’s more familiar stories like “Barn Burning”, “A Rose for Emily”, “Dry September” and “That Evening Sun”, this also features a variety of excellent stories, exhibiting Faulkner’s great mastery of the language and in some (most notably “Carcassone”) his ability to write poetic prose.

Some stories that I thought were especially good were:

“The Tall Men” – A government inspector travels from Jackson to deliver a warrant for two men who have not registered with the selective service, with a treatise of government programs and how they can be received by free and independent men of the time.

“Two Soldiers” an older brother enlists after Pearl Harbor and younger brother travels on foot to Memphis to find him and it’s companion story “Shall Not Perish” – loss of a son who went to World War II and a connection to past wars at the De Spain house.

“Elly” – Akin to Faulkner’s tragic heroine Temple Drake is Elly, a young woman representative of the New South, as her frank sexuality is repressed by her austere and deaf grandmother, representing the Old South with its more restrictive mores and ethics.

“Uncle Willy” – Faulkner deals with severe substance abuse in Jefferson Mississippi, as a fourteen-year-old assists a local morphine addict. Faulkner’s wry humor shines through what would otherwise be a very somber subject.

“Red Leaves” – One of the most complicated stories Faulkner wrote about how the local Native American tribe, likely Chickasaw, owned a plantation and slaves.

“Lo!” – a somewhat humorous visit between “The President” and the Choctaw chief; though never named specifically, scholars opine, and I agree, that this is likely based upon Jackson – who comes across as generally racist against the Choctaws, and by extension, all “Indians” meaning Native Americans.

“All the dead pilots” – we see a Sartoris in the fighting in France.

“The Brooch” – Faulkner returns to his ability to write in the horror genre, a tale of modern angst and paranoia that may have inspired later generations of writers.

I have read before that Faulkner was an inspiration to many Latin American writers, most notably Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez, and this is particularly evident in the stories "Black Music", "The Leg", "Mistral", "Divorce in Naples" and "Carcassonne".

This is like most of Faulkner’s writing, it can be heavy and somewhat difficult to read, but it is a pronouncement of his great talent.

[منال الحسيني · Rating 2 out of 5]

رغم أن فوكنر يعد من أفضل الكتاب الذي وصفوا الحياة والمجتمع الأمريكي في بدايات القرن العشرين، إلا أن القصص هنا تبدو بلا معنى، مجرد سرد للأحداث ومبالغة في الوصف دون هدف واضح أو مغزى عميق .. تبدأ القصة بشكل جيد ثم تبدأ الخطوط في التفكك لتنتهي بنهاية باهتة
اعجبني وصفه لبعض الشخصيات والأشياء، لكن حبكات القصص لم تكن على المستوى المطلوب

[William2]

Is it just me, or are the stories not quite up to the standard of the novels? I may be wrong. Just getting started.

* Asterisk indicates a favorite.

Read
“Barn Burning”
“A Rose for Emily”
“A Bear Hunt”
“Two Soldiers”

What’s amazing though, and it’s something Michael Gorra points out in his The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War, is the narrative continuity Faulkner displays from his very first novel, Flags in the Dust. From that 1929 novel all of Yoknapatawpha county and its characters are laid out like a template, which the later novels and stories follow more or less faithfully.

Read
* “Shall Not Perish”
“Centaur in Brass”

There’s an element of offputting minstrelsy in Centaur that reminds me of a similar clowning in Flags. But then, it’s strange, the minstrelsy—I won’t say it’s redeemed—but it’s shown to have grown out of the underhanded deeds of a white man, Flem Snopes, who had set two men of color against each other. The men get vengeance of a kind.

Read
“Dry September”

A man of color is lynched by vigilantes. Writing is choppy, rushed. I’m not crazy about the counter-pointed structure either. Mercenary? Stories were cash cows for top writers in those days.

Read
“Elly”
“Uncle Willy”
* “That Evening Sun”

“Elly” is melodramatic dreck. Howlingly bad. “Uncle Willy” is about a pharmacist and “dope-fiend” of forty years whom community leaders decide to dry out. “That Evening Sun” is about a woman of color who is hysterical with fear over her absent partner, Jesus; she takes the (insufferable) Compson children home with her; presumably Jesus won’t murder her in the presence of white children.

Read
“Red Leaves”
* “Beyond”
“Wash”

RL has the scent of old Hollywood westerns. Readable mainly for its howlers. Seems doubly false at a time when we’ve become familiar with so many excellent indigenous writers, who, had they written this story, would most likely have named a tribe and not made them cannibals. Faulkner doesn’t do the former but does do the latter.

So far all of the stories I have read were written in the early 1930s.

[Caterina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nearly every story is excellent or very good in this surprisingly wide-ranging 900-page collection. The prose alone is worth wallowing in, and for the most part easier on the reader than Faulkner’s experimental novels. What a storyteller, what a master of language and cultural immersion, explorer of the human.

Arranged into six thematic sections, the more devastating stories are interleaved and leavened by lighter, even humorous tales. The stories of the first three sections are set in Faulkner’s fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, and many of the further-flung stories have some connection to that home base. In time, they range from before the Civil War to the mid-20th century, post-World War II.

I. The Country — Six stories focused on some of the county’s more hapless inhabitants. Explosively kicking off the collection is “Barn Burning,” a philosophically and psychologically challenging account of a downtrodden white sharecropper family whose patriarch Abner Snopes, unwilling to accept his oppressed position, carries out his own version of justice to the detriment of his own family. There’s a pretty good short film rendition starring Tommy Lee Jones (way too good-looking to play Ab Snopes, I thought) — mostly faithful to the text but deprived of the languid sensual details of Faulkner’s prose, like this:

They all three squatted on the gallery and ate, slowly, without talking; then in the store again, they drank from a tin dipper tepid water smelling of the cedar bucket and of living beech trees.

Or this:

Then he was out of the room, out of the house, in the mild dust of the starlit road and the heavy rifeness of honeysuckle, the pale ribbon unspooling with terrific slowness under his running feet, reaching the gate at last and turning in, running, his heart and lungs drumming, up on the drive toward the lighted house, the lighted door. He did not knock, he burst in, sobbing for breath, incapable for the moment of speech . . .

In this and other stories, the freshness and innocence of a young boy’s narrative and moral perspective counters the story's harsh intensity. Several explored these young men’s courageous sense of duty. I especially liked “Two Soldiers” — about a very young boy’s dogged determination to follow his older brother to war — the Great War.


From the 1980 short film starring Tommy Lee Jones, filmed on location near Faulkner’s home in Mississippi

II. The Village — These ten stories center on the townspeople of Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi — including many creative con artists, dishonest operators, and occasionally an intended victim who manages to outwit his or her would-be victimizer. It was my first encounter with the classic “A Rose for Emily” which marries the Gothic to the Southern for a truly grotesque tale — one of several that bring to light the stifling social conditions for women in that time and place.

But garages and cotton gins had encroached and obliterated even the august names of that neighborhood; only Miss Emily’s house was left, lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and gas pumps—an eyesore among eyesores.

The real-life horror story is “Dry September” which basically revealed the racist monster hidden (or not-so-hidden) under the skin of nearly every white citizen, and Faulkner's exposé of a bizarre violent sexual-racial-cultural dynamic involving "protection" of white women. Only one story (that I can recall), “Hair,” has what might be called a traditional happy ending. It was such joy to encounter in part because it comes about in such an unexpected, nontraditional way.

Faulkner's women seem almost always driven beyond accepted limits and norms by their sexuality. They are rarely chaste or even faithful (in direct contradiction of cultural notions of purity?) -- this bothered me, but surprisingly, this also seemed to be something Faulkner celebrated and affirmed rather than condemning. There was something of the stereotype of woman being close to nature, part of nature, wild and free, almost wild animals -- but also smarter than men (who were even worse animals) and not to be caged by men. But often, tragically, caged by men.

III. The Wilderness — Four strange stories about the Chickasaw Indians of Mississippi, who no more live in the wilderness than the White people do, but on a plantation where they hold Black slaves. In the memorable story “Lo!” the entire tribe travels to Washington D.C. to meet with the unnamed U.S. president to right an injustice, regarding themselves as equal parties to a legitimate treaty. Both sides are completely bewildered by the behavior of the others — the Chickasaw cannot understand why they are not extended the hospitality of actually staying in the obviously very spacious White House and made to camp outside in the snow. There were some problems with Faulkner’s portrayals of Native Americans that have been subject to criticism.

IV. The Wasteland My God! I had no idea Faulkner wrote war stories about the Great War, the war that consumed his generation, and these five were some of his best stories. In “Ad Astra” several drunken and psychologically devastated airmen celebrate the Armistice in a French tavern. Nothing much happens and yet the story is a masterpiece.

We are like men trying to move in water, with held breath watching our terrific and infinitesimal limbs, watching one another’s stasis without touch, without contact, robbed of all save the impotence and need. — from “Ad Astra”

He was squat, small and thick, but his sobriety was colossal. In that maelstrom of alcohol where the rest of us has fled our inescapable selves he was like a rock, talking quietly in a grave bass four sizes too big for him. — from “Ad Astra”

Then the first shell fell. I can imagine it: he standing there in that quiet, peaceful, redolent, devastated room, with the bashed-in door and the musing and waiting city beyond it, and then that slow, unhurried, reverberant sound coming down upon the thick air of spring like a hand laid without haste on the damp silence; he told how dust or sand or plaster, something, sifted somewhere whispering down in a faint hiss, and how a big, lean cat came over the bar without a sound and flowed down to the floor and vanished like dirty quicksilver.— from “All the Dead Pilots”

The courage, the recklessness, call it what you will, is the flash, the instant of sublimation; then flick! the old darkness again. . . And so, being momentary, it can be preserved and prolonged only on paper: a picture, a few written words that any match...can obliterate in an instant. A one-inch sliver of sulfur-tipped wood is longer than memory or grief; a flame no larger than a sixpence is fiercer than courage or despair. — from “All the Dead Pilots”

V. The Middle Ground Eleven stories of widely varying locales and themes that don’t fit into any of the other sections, including “Mountain Victory” -- an ill-fated encounter between a Chickasaw-French Creole Confederate Army officer Saucier Weddel and his disabled Black son, returning from the now-lost war to Mississippi, and an extremely poor white Appalachian family in Tennessee who were Union supporters.

"Soshay Weddel,” the girl breathed into the dry chinking, the crumbled and powdery wall. She could see him at full length, in his stained and patched and brushed cloak, with his head lifted a little and his face worn, almost gaunt, stamped with a kind of indomitable weariness and yet arrogant too, like a creature from another world with other air to breathe and another kind of blood to warm the veins.

While the Appalachian daughter sees their visitors as her hope for escape to a better life, the son who was wounded in combat sees otherwise. Meanwhile the unnaturally calm and philosophical (or perhaps just exhausted) Weddel contemplates his own history of repeatedly making what turns out to be the wrong choice between two alternatives.

VI. Beyond Six more experimental stories that go “beyond” in various unexpected ways: beyond the grave, beyond the realms of consciousness, beyond heterosexuality.

We were twenty-one then; we talked like that, tramping about the peaceful land where in green petrification the old splendid bloody deeds, the spirits of the blundering courageous men, slumbered in every stone and tree. For that was 1914, and girls and young men drifted in punts on the moonlit river and sang Mister Moon and There's a Bit of Heaven, and George and I talked of courage and honor and love and Ben Jonson and death.


.

Steed and rider thunder on, thunder punily diminishing: a dying star upon the immensity of darkness and of silence within which, steadfast, fading, deepbreasted and grave of flank, muses the dark and tragic figure of the Earth, his mother.

-- the final sentence of the final story in this collection

[Owen · Rating 3 out of 5]

In my experience, one does not become a reader of William Faulkner so much as a student of William Faulkner. Reading his work is, well, a lot of work. I’m reminded of a person who is forced to attend an opera which is performed in a foreign language, in a historical setting, without the benefit of subtitles and the evening’s program. Faulkner’s art is similarly inaccessible, and I must admit that his stories initially irritated me in the same way a fat lady in a Viking costume, screeching on a stage in a foreign language, might annoy our novice opera-goer.

To this day, I still read Faulkner with a pen and paper in hand, diagramming character relationships and the chronology of events as if I were a trying to an answer a question on the LSAT. More times that not, I find that I actually enjoy the second reading of his stories because I’m not so busy trying to figure such basic elements as who is speaking to whom.

While Faulkner doesn’t write in Italian or German, he does like to make up his own English on occasion. Before you read his novels or Collected Stories, I recommend that you become familiar, if you aren’t already, with the words “anathema,” “apotheosis,” “sibilant,” and “effluvium.” He loves those. Also, please exercise extreme patience with his use of floating pronouns—that is, pronouns without apparent antecedents—especially in the opening pages of each story. It might take a few thousand words for you to discover the person whom “he” or “she” refers to, if you’re lucky. Finally, consider interjecting your own punctuation in sentences that last for more than a page or two. Remember that rule about limiting a sentence to one or two ideas? Neither does Faulkner.

Part of the fun about Faulkner, and I’m not kidding, is figuring out what the hell is happening in the story; it’s seldom obvious. He creates this challenge both purposely and unintentionally. His stream-of-consciousness and nonlinear plotlines are, of course, intentional mystical effects. But his lack of dialogue attribution and his inability to visually orient a scene tend to nonplus the reader. Consider the opening of “The Leg.”

The boat—it was a yawl boat with a patched weathered sail—made two reaches below us while I sat with the sculls poised, watching her over my shoulder, and George clung to the pile, spouting Milton at Everbe Corinthia. When it made the final tack I looked back at George. But he was now but well into Comus’ second speech, his crooked face raised, and the afternoon bright on his close ruddy head.
“Give way, George,” I said. But he held us stationary at the pile, his glazed hat lifted, spouting his fine and cadenced folly as though the lock, the Thames, time and all, belonged to him, while Sabrina (or Hebe or Chloe or whatever name he happened to be calling Corinthia at the time) with her dairy-maid’s complexion and her hair like mead poured in sunlight stood above us in one endless succession of neat print dresses, her hand on the lever and one eye on George and the other on the yawl, saying “Yes, milord” dutifully whenever George paused for a breath.
The yawl luffed and stood away; the helmsman shouted for the lock.
“Let go, George,” I said. But he clung to the pile in his fine and incongruous oblivion.

It goes without saying, then, that enjoying Faulkner isn’t a passive activity, at least not on the first reading (or diagramming). Before tackling his Collected Stories (a nine-hundred-page volume of veritable code) you should be forewarned that all of his novels, except one, were out of print until he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949. Such irony underscores the premise that most people don’t read Faulkner so much as they study and appreciate him. Or perhaps they study him before they read him. I know I did. I didn’t truly enjoy Faulkner until I took a graduate class in which we slowly digested five of his novels: The Sound and The Fury (1929); As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1932); Absalom, Absalom (1936); and Go Down Moses (1942).

Collected Stories is comprised of forty-two short stories. In today’s publishing world, I dare say more than half of these short stories wouldn’t have made the final cut. Some of them, such as “A Justice,” “Red Leaves,” and “A Courtship,” might have worked better parceled together as a novella, since they focus on the same characters and story. Others, quite simply, are poorly crafted with unrealistic dialogue (in the sense that it replicates Fraulkner’s southern gothic narrative style and not how people speak) and too many characters, nameless and otherwise, for the medium of a short story, if not a novel. It’s like trying to conduct Mahler’s 8th Symphony in a public restroom. For example, his story “Fox Hunt” has no central character, yet there are several ancillary figures playing counterpoint to this nothingness, including “the old dame,” “the boy,” “the white man,” the youth,” the older man,” “the woman,” the man,” the man at the bay.” My God, Faulkner, give me somebody I can care about.

Yet there are stories that are exceptionally well done, too. And while I don’t think any modern reader with a cable and internet subscription would attempt this entire volume without either 1) Having a gun at his head, or 2) an English paper due, I suspect that many of these stories, if anthologized or reduced to a compendium, might win Faulkner a few converts. I can safely recommend eleven of these stories: 1) “A Rose for Emily,” 2) “Dry September,” 3) “Victory,” 4) “The Evening Sun” 5) “Dr. Martino” 6) “Artist at Home,” 7) “The Brooch” 8) “Golden Land” 9) “Crevasse,” 10) “Two Soldiers,” and 11) “Barn Burning.” Contrary to popular thought, not all of Faulkner’s stories are set in the deep South. Of this collection, one is actually set in Beverly Hills and several others are set in Europe during the World War I era.

What makes the above mentioned stories exceptional? What, in other words, allows them to overcome the dead weight of more than half of this volume to win the National Book Award?

For one, Faulkner illuminates the psychological and moral depth and the emotional and intellectual complexity of many people who were previously stereotyped and marginalized, such as African Americans and Native Americans, if not southerners in general, be they poor or wealthy. That’s an award-winning service to America in and of itself. Secondly, Faulkner’s a damn good story-teller when he doesn’t let his writing get in the way. He reminds me of so many tragic heroes who have such outstanding strengths and weaknesses that the effect is nearly bipolar, like going on a trip with Dr. Jekyll—Mr. Hyde as your guide.

Consequently, I both love and hate Faulkner, depending on whether the genius can hold the monster at bay. Sometimes the reader is mesmerized with phrases such as “old women dropsical with good living” or “the iron silence of winter.” At other times he pulls along so many adjectives and clauses that the meaning of his run-on sentence eventually derails whenever the plot takes a sharp turn. For example:

“But the man did not seem to notice this, so they soon were talking in undertone, watching with bright, alert, curious eyes the stiff, incongruous figure leaning a little forward on the stick, looking out a foul window beyond which there was nothing to see save an occasional shattered road and man-high stump of shattered tree breaking small patches of tilled land whorled with apparent unreason about island of earth indicated by low signboards painted red, the islands inscrutable, desolate above the destruction which they wombed.”

And that’s one of the small ones. Since some of Faulkner’s sentences run the length of a short story, I’m tempted to generalize that his rococo, serpentine style is more of a liability in the short story medium than in long fiction. I certainly enjoy his novels more than his short stories.

Overall, Collected Stories has many gems, but you’ll have to dig for them. I think you’ll enjoy the story about Emily Griersen, a pitiful anachronism in the New South. You’ll like the irony found in “Victory,” and the genteel evil of “Dry September.” You’ll fear Jesus, a man with a razor, in “The Evening Sun,” and marvel at the psychological grip of physically frail characters such as Dr. Martino and Mrs. Boyd. Finally, you’ll be touched by the bond of brothers in “Two Soldiers” as well as the moral dilemma faced by a young boy in “Barn Burning.”

[Lori Keeton · Rating 4 out of 5]

I started reading this in January, so exactly 4 months to finish these 42 stories by Faulkner. I enjoyed a good many of them and some more than others. I was introduced to Faulkner's writing style with this collection of stories and I agree that he has written some of the best southern stories to be read. A favorite is A Rose for Emily. An excellent example of a gothic southern love story. I appreciated Faulkner's interest in flying and some of his aviation stories were quite humorous but his interest in military is seen in stories he wrote with Civil War themes and WW2 themes.

Other stories of note:

Barn Burning
Mountain Victory
The Brooch

[Dave Gourdoux · Rating 5 out of 5]

My opinion (for whatever it is worth) is that Faulkner was a much better short story writer than novelist. The form put limits on his stream of consciousness techniques and forced him to keep the narratives moving, which he seems to struggle with in the longer form. Stories like "That Evening Sun", "Barn Burning", "Two Soldiers" and its sequel, "Shall Not Perish" are as good as any I've ever read. There's also "Dry September" and the famous "A Rose For Emily". When I think of it, the reason these stories work so much better than his novels is that his style, with the cadence and razor sharp imagery of poetry, creates a dramatic tension that is probably impossible to sustain in a longer work.

[Greg]

I'm giving it up with 'Collected Stories' after having read 'Red Leaves', which is about some Indians discussing whether to eat their Negro slaves. This is too much for me I'm afraid.
We were warned from the back cover synopsis -
'In this extraordinary collection, Faulkner captures the bitter tensions of America's Deep South. - - Faulkner's muscular, vivid prose lays bare the anguish of the land riven with violence and racial conflict, and the pathos, dignity and troubled history of its people.'
'If you imagine Huckleberry Finn living in the House of Usher and telling stories while the walls crumble about him, that will give you the double quality of Faulkner's work at its best.'

All the stories are mostly unrelentingly depressing with no hint of joy or happiness, but that last one decided it for me. The stories are all different, but all the same in a way. I found it hard going with so much talking about 'niggers' a lot of the time. I think the writing is different to Faulkner's novels, which are more demanding and have a cinematic structure which I like. I love the novels I've read so far and will not be discouraged from reading others.

I stopped reading at page 343.

[Scott Hale · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The Tall Men" moved me to tears. "The Bear Hunt" is hilarious, the combination "Carcassone" and "The Black Music" destroyed my every conception of what is artistically possible with the pen. read them in this order and "Carcassonne" will befuddle you as an abstract matter created purely for artistic pleasure, then "The Black Music" will reassemble this same mass of abstract imagery into a completely coherent and vital spectacle of the singularity of human life. In this you will experience the pure genius of Faulkner.

[Monica Perez · Rating 5 out of 5]

Faulkner is worth the extra effort. Give me Faulkner over Hemingway and Fitzgerald any day.

[Elizabeth (Alaska) · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read these stories over a period of months interspersed with other reading. Several times I thought "Faulkner doesn't tell us what to think, he just reflects life as he sees it." His characters are varied as in life - rich and poor, upstanding citizens and rapscallions.

Faulkner has a reputation for being difficult. I thought mostly his prose was straight forward. There was no stream of consciousness, and there were only a few very long sentences. Faulkner himself grouped these stories under the headings: The Country; The Village; The Wilderness; The Wasteland; The Middle Ground; Beyond. Some of the characters were familiar to me from having read the Snopes trilogy. Abner Snopes also appears in As I Lay Dying, and maybe others I have yet to read. I was particularly interested in the section The Wasteland because those touched on aspects of WWI, a favorite subject of mine.

My favorite story was "A Bear Hunt" which appears early in the collection. Upstanding citizens and good old boys alike gather on the eve of a day or more of hunting. Ratliff tells the story of Lucius Provine who maybe 20 years ago was a wild youth and with his friends would shoot up the town on a Saturday night or gallop their horses after church ladies on a Sunday morning or interfere with a Negro picnic. Now Lucius is about 40, settled down mostly and a member of the group of men going hunting. Except Lucius has had the hiccups for a day and a half. The story progresses as to how Lucius was scared out of his hiccups. It is a wonderful story, with a hilarious conclusion. My husband has a saying "paybacks are hell" and it fits this story perfectly.

I admit that I didn't love all of these stories. There were two or three when, after I finished, I wondered what Faulkner tried to say, but overall this is simply a wonderful collection. There is also his The Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner, and I stumbled across a collection of mysteries, Knight's Gambit. So much to look forward to! For those stories I simply didn't understand, this might be only 4-stars, but there were too many stories I loved. That has to make this 5-stars.

[Jeanette · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great to reread after decades.

I like these as core personality, locale, placements and language to a 5 star all the way.

For me, they are better than the novels and in a bullseye core rather than the long convoluted eloquence prose flow.

[Ariel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I could read "Carcassonne" a hundred times and never get tired of it. What I can't do is think about Faulkner for too long, because when I do it I feel like my head's going to burst with admiration. How natural his talent and genius feels when reading his prose, how effortlessly the stories flow out of him. Reading his stories, especially those set in his Yoknapatawpha, I feel like I'm not really reading a fictional work but rather that I'm witnessing through words something that actually happened. As Faulkner himself said, "The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life", and how true that sounds in his particular case. The general impression that Faulkner's fiction leave in my mind is that of a music box through which, when opened, I can see a wide landscape where a million things are going on at the same time, and reading a specific short story is like zooming into a tiny portion of that landscape, while the rest is still going on. The children in "That Evening Sun" who complain and tease each other are the same children that will effect the tragic story of "The Sound and the Fury", and the fate of Thomas Sutpen in "Absalom, Absalom!" is already predestined in "Wash". And everything is told with such a conviction, with a self-assurance that is both admirable and scary--and of course enviable. For me at least.

[Sohan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Southern Gothic হল উনিশ শতকের গোড়া থেকে আজ অবধি প্রচলিত এক সাহিত্যিক ধারা। এ ধারার বৈশিষ্ট্য বলতে এতে থাকে কিছু অযোক্তিক, ভয়ঙ্কর, আইন ফাইনের তোয়াক্কা না করা চিন্তাধারা;অভিলাষ, আর কিছু বিশেষ প্রবৃত্তি। এছাড়া থাকে উদ্ভট খামখেয়ালিপূর্ণ কিছু চরিত্র, ডার্ক হিউমার, আর বিচ্ছিন্নতাবোধের প্রচণ্ড হাহাকার।
এই ধারার মধ্যে দিয়েই উঠে আসে আমেরিকার দক্ষিণাঞ্চলের ঐতিহাসিক বাস্তবতাঃ বর্ণবাদ, দাসত্ব ও পিতৃতন্ত্রের ব্যাপক দমন পীড়ন।

এডগার এলেন পো (১৮০৯-১৮৪৯) যিনি প্রথম সার্থকতার সাথে এই ধারার লেখালেখি অন্বেষণ করেছিলেন। তাঁর অনেক বিখ্যাত কবিতা কিংবা ছোট গল্পের মধ্যে সাউদার্ন গথিকের উপাদান খুঁজে পাওয়া যায় যদিও সবগুলো কবিতা বা ছোট গল্পের প্রেক্ষাপট দক্ষিণাঞ্চলে না।
এলেন পো সাউদার্ন গথিকের মূল প্রতিষ্ঠাতা সভাপতি হলেও, দীর্ঘতম সময় নিয়ে ঘানি টেনেছেন যিনি তিনি উয়িলিয়াম ফকনার(১৮৯৭-১৯৬২)। এছাড়াও এই ধারা উত্তরসূরি ছিলেন বিখ্যাত সব লেখক, সবার আগে আমার মনে আসে ফ্লানারি ও’কনর (১৯২৫-১৯৬৪) এঁর কথা কিংবা রিচার্ড রাইট সহ আরও অনেকে।
ফকনারের গল্পে উঠে আসে মার্কিন গৃহযুদ্ধের তিক্ত অভিজ্ঞতা, জনমনের সামাজিক, জাতিগত, অর্থনৈতিক বিপর্যয়, প্রভৃতি।
সাদা কালো সমস্যা নিয়ে আমেরিকায় কয়েকবার গৃহযুদ্ধ হয়েছে। আব্রাহাম লিঙ্কন সামাল দিতে পারলেও কিন্তু নিহত হলেন আততায়ীর হাতে। বারাক ওবামা আসার পর অনেকেই মনে করেছিলেন বর্ণবাদের সমস্যা মিটে গেছে, কালোদের জয় হয়েছে। আসলেই কি তাই হয়েছে?

ফকনার লেখার স্টাইল হিসেবে stream of consciousness কেই বেছে নিয়েছিলেন। লেখার বিষয় করেছিলেন অন্তর্জগতের অবমাননা। inner contempt এর ফলে যে psychological disruption ঘটে সেটা তো আর রাজনৈতিক লড়াই দিয়ে অধিকার আদায় দিয়ে সে সমস্যার সমাধান হয় না। মনের সেই রুঢ়, জটিল ও অন্ধকার জগতে গভীর অনুসন্ধান চালিয়েছেন লেখক। যে জগত অত্যন্ত রুক্ষ, যে জগতে নেই বিভূতিভূষণীয় অরণ্য থাকলেও হয়তো খুব হঠাৎ পাওয়া যেতে পারে জীবনানন্দময় দু দণ্ড শান্তি।

স্বাভাবিকভাবেই, তাঁর লেখা একটু দুর্বোধ্য মনে হতে পারে। আমার কাছে তাই মনে হয়েছে। প্রথম গল্প Barn Burning পড়ে কিছুটা থতমত খেয়েছিলাম। অদ্ভুত লেখায় স্টাইল। পুরো গল্পটির কথক একটা ঘোড়া! প্রথমে বুঝতেই পারিনি। কৃষণ চন্দরের ‘আমি গাধা বলছি’ কিংবা ‘গাধার আত্মকথা’ পড়লেই পাঠক বুঝতে পারেন প্রতীকী অর্থে হোক বা যাই হোক গল্পটা বলা হচ্ছে একটা গাধার মুখ দিয়ে। এই গল্পটা যে একটা ঘোড়া বলছে সেটা বুঝতে না পারলে একটু বিরক্তই লাগতে পারে।
আমি ভেবেছিলাম আমিই বুঝি ফকনার বুঝি না। ব্যাপারটা সেরকম না, লেখকের জীবদ্দসাতেই শুনতে হয়েছিল, ‘আপনার লেখা একবার পড়ে বোঝাই যায় না’ লেখক বলেছিলেন, ‘চারবার পড়ুন’
সে যাকগে। যে কয়েকটা গল্প ভাল লেগেছে বা কিছুটা হলেও বুঝতে পেরেছি সেগুলো হলঃ
Wash—এ এক অদ্ভুত মনস্তত্ত্বিক গল্প। গল্পটা আমার কাছে কেমন একটা অস্তিত্ববাদী ধারার গল্প মনে হয়েছে। দুটি চরিত্র শাটপেন আর ওয়াশ। দু’জন সমবয়সি হলেও শাটপেনের রয়েছে আভিজাত্য, করেছেন যুদ্ধ যার ফলে শাটপেনের প্রতি ওয়াশের রয়েছে আলাদা ভক্তি। দু���নের মধ্যেই রয়েছে রাজনৈতিক মতাদর্শগত মিল কিন্তু কোথায় জানি একটা ফাঁক, শাটপেনের আভিজাত্যের কাছে যেন ওয়াশ ‘কিছু’ নয়।
ওয়াশের এক নাতনি আছে, নাম মিলি। ছোট্ট মেয়েটা হঠাৎ অন্তঃসত্ত্বা হয়ে যায়। পাঠকের আর বুঝতে বাকি থাকে না হু ইজ দ্য কালপ্রিট। ওয়াশও বোঝে। ঘোড়ার আস্তাবলে মিলি একটা কন্যা সন্তান প্রসব করে। ওয়াশ খুব আগ্রহ নিয়ে শাটপেনের কাছে যায়। কিন্তু সে প্রত্যক্ষ করে শাটপেনের এই নিয়ে তেমন আগ্রহ নেই, যতো না তার আগ্রহ ঘোড়া নিয়ে। সে চাবুক দিয়ে ওয়াশকে পাল্টা শাসন করতে যায়।
এরপর ওয়াশের একটা রূপান্তর ঘটে। সেটা আমি লিখছিনা। এই গল্পটা গৃহযুদ্ধোত্তর টেনশন নিয়ে। কালোদের প্রভাব তখন অল্প বিস্তর বৃদ্ধি পাচ্ছে। এই গল্পে দেখতে পাচ্ছি লড়াই সাদা কালোর মধ্যে না, লড়াইটা আভিজাত্যের বিরুদ্ধে।
গল্পটা প্রকাশিত হয়েছে ১৯৩৪ সালে।

A Rose for Emily—ভাবা যায়না স্রেফ এই গল্পটা বুঝতে আমাকে সামারি এন্ড এনালাইসিস কোর্স দেখতে হয়েছে। এই গল্পটাও Wash গল্পটার মতো Post Civil War South প্রেক্ষাপটে লেখা।
এমিলি গ্রিয়ারসণ এক অদ্ভুত আর রহস্যময় নারী। মজার ব্যাপার, উইলিয়াম ফকনারের গল্প বলার ধরণ আরও অদ্ভুত। লেখক এমিলির নিঃসঙ্গতা, ব্যর্থতা, বেদনা, ভালবাসা, হত্যা কোনও কিছু নির্দিষ্টরূপে বলেননি। ছেড়ে দিয়েছেন পাঠকের সিদ্ধান্তের উপর। প্রকৃতপক্ষে এমলি চরিত্র কি চেয়েছিল সেটা পাঠকের কাছে সমর্পণ করে দিয়েছেন তিনি, যথেষ্ট পরিমান এভিডেন্স সহ।
রহস্যময় এমিলিকে নিয়ে এলাকায় বেশ কথাবার্তা হয়। অভিজাত এই ‘ভদ্র’ মহিলার পূর্ব জীবন দেখানোর জন্য লেখক কখনও বর্তমান সময়ে কখনও পূর্বে চলে গিয়েছেন। তার মৃত্যুর সময় কৌতূহলী প্রতিবেশীরা তার বাড়িতে দোতলায় একটা রহস্যময় ঘর খুঁজে পায়। তালা ভেঙ্গে ভেতরে ঢুঁকে দেখা যায় বিছানায় পরে থাকা একটা পচা গলা লাশ একটা বালিশে শুয়ে আছে। ঘরটা বিয়ের দিনের মতো করে সাজানো। বিছানার পাশে বরের পোশাক। সবাই লক্ষ্য করে লাশের পাশের বালিশে একটা চুল, ধূসর রঙের চুল। ঠিক বৃদ্ধা এমিলির চুলের মতো।
লাশটির পরিচয় জানাতে পাঠককে এক ধাক্কায় অতীতে নিয়ে যান লেখক। কে সেই পুরুষ? কেনই বা মৃত? কিভাবে মৃত? ধূসর চুলটা কিসের প্রতীক?

Two Soldiers—দুই ভাইয়ের গল্প। বড় ভাই বছর কুড়ি কি একুশ আর ছোটটা বছর দশেক। সময়টা দ্বিতীয় বিশ্বযুদ্ধের। খবর বলতে তখন পত্রিকা আর রেডিও। রেডিওতেই তখন লাইভ অনুষ্ঠান। বড় ভাই প্রতিদিন এক প্রতিবেশীর বাড়িতে খবর শুনতে যায়। ছোট ভাইটা ভাইয়ের ন্যাটা। সব জায়গায় যায় পিছু পিছু। রেডিওতে ওরা শুনতে পায় জাপান নাকি আমেরিকায় আক্রমন করেছে অনেক মানুষ মেরে ফেলেছে। বড় ভাইটা ক্ষেপে যায়, দ্রুত সিদ্ধান্ত নেয় সে যুদ্ধে যাবে, জাপানি মেরে সাফাই করে দেবে। ছোট ভাইটা এই শুনে বলে সেও নাকি যাবে। সে ছাড়া বড় ভাইকে আর কে সাহায্য করতে পারবে? জল-টল এনে দেবে কে?
মায়ের সাথে বাক বিতণ্ডা করে বড় ভাই একদিন বেড়িয়ে পরে ক্যাম্পের উদ্দেশ্যে। ছোটটা জেদ ধরলেও মা কোনমতে থামিয়ে দেয়। পরদিন সকাল হতে না হতেই সেই ছোট্ট ছেলেটি কোলের মধ্যে কয়েকটা পাখির ডিম নিয়ে বেড়িয়ে পরে ভাইকে খুঁজে বের করতে।
কয়েকশ মাইল পাড়ি দিয়ে বড় ভাইয়ের কাছে সে পৌঁছাতে পারে কি? কি হয় তারপর?

ছোট গল্পের রিভিউ আর বড় করে লাভ নাই। এই পর্যন্তই থাক। আরও অনেক গল্প আছে যেগুলো ভাল লেগেছে। কিছু গল্প এখনো বুঝে উঠতে পারিনি। চারবার পড়বো কি? ফকনারের লেখার ধরণ একটু জটিল মনে হলেও কেন জানি ওনাকে খুব ভাল লেগে গেছে। ওনার বিতর্কিত বই Absalom, Absalom! পড়ার ইচ্ছে আছে। পোস্টমডার্ন লিটারেচার নিয়ে আগ্রহ থাকলে আপনারাও পড়ে দেখতে পারেন।

পুনশ্চঃ আজ টিকা নিয়েছি। হাতটা একটু ব্যাথা করছে।
আপনারা টিকা নিয়েছেন?
~১৩ই আশ্বিন, ১৪২৮

[Albert · Rating 3 out of 5]

I purchased this collection when I was in college and began reading it back then but stopped for some unknown reason. In many ways this collection was phenomenal, eye-opening. As some other reviewers have indicated, the range of subjects is very broad: Mississippi and Yoknapatawpha County certainly, the Civil War and its aftermath. WWi, traveling in Europe, the list is long. What was perhaps most enlightening for me is that the prose style in many of the stories is simple, straightforward—in no way like the dense, layered, convoluted style of his greatest novels. So he could write differently! In fact, it was almost as if the style he used in his greatest novels was adopted, designed to reflect the thoughts of the characters and the heat and humidity of the country. Talk about an architectural component of prose.

I was also surprised at how much humor I found in his stories. One of my favorites of Faulkner’s novels is The Reivers, simply because of how much it made me grin, chuckle and laugh. So I enjoyed finding that humor in many of the stories. Some of the stories also provided additional background and details about the Yoknapatawpha families: Comptons, Sartoris, Sutpens and Snopes, which I relished.

Unfortunately, the quality of the stories varied considerably. Many were very good; some were excellent, and some otherwise. I found it consistent that if the story was about Mississippi, his fabled Yoknapatawpha county or the Civil War, it was good to excellent. The quality varied when the focus of the stories shifted to other topics.

Here are some of my favorites and brief comments as to why:

Centaur in Brass – I love any story in which Flem Snopes is a major character, and in this instance, he gets outsmarted!
Mule in the Yard – Another Snopes being outsmarted. Great fun.
Turnabout – A WWI story that shined.
Wash – A clash between classes in the post-Civil War South.
Artist at Home – Enjoyed this for the very simple, straight-forward writing style that Faulkner used.
My Grandmother Millard and General Bedford Forrest and the Battle of Harrykin Creek – A tale at the end of the Civil War. Hilarious.
There Was a Queen – For me, the best story in the collection. Provides great insight into the Sartoris family

I have always believed some book awards are given for catch-up purposes. How could the major awards miss Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom!, As I Lay Dying and Light in August. “Well, we screwed that up, so we need to fix it by giving an award to one of his current books.” As good as this collection is at times, I feel it receiving the National Book Award was a catch-up, as was the Pulitzer awarded to A Fable. Many readers dismiss The Reivers as a minor work but I feel it was well deserving of its Pulitzer.

This collection is 42 stories, 900 pages. Worth reading for a Faulkner aficionado, but otherwise I would look to read a shorter list of his best work.

[Dan Witte · Rating 5 out of 5]

For almost any contemporary reader, William Faulkner’s literary reputation precedes him. By that, I mean that it’s impossible to read him without being consciously aware of the achievements and awards he gathered while alive, and the legend accrued to him after death. Even if you’ve never read Faulkner – and before this I barely had – you still can’t help but come to this collection with some preconceived ideas about his writing, especially his style and themes. I certainly did, but I quickly found myself immersed in the worlds and minds of his characters, to the point I often forgot I was even reading Faulkner. I found this rich and varied collection of stories very satisfying, and while not every story was necessarily great, that’s true of any body of work. His prose is sometimes tough and merciless, sometimes tender and humorous, and the stories themselves are all over the map, literally. I really enjoyed “A Rose for Emily” which, if not his greatest short story, is arguably his best known. “A Mule in the Yard” was unusually fun and antic for Faulkner, while “That Will be Fine” is darkly humorous in the line of “As I Lay Dying”. “Lo!” has some very funny, Twain-like moments, as does “My Grandmother Millard”. There are 42 stories in total here, arranged by Faulkner himself, and I can’t possibly do justice to them. I happened to finish this collection on the 4th of July, possibly our most consequential Independence Day since achieving our independence, and spent a minute or so thinking about our most treasured American writers. I’ve read scholarly dissertations about Faulkner declaring him the consummate American writer, more so than Twain or Hemingway, more so than Flannery O’Connor or John Steinbeck or Kurt Vonnegut. This is ultimately a moot argument, not because there’s no way to be right about it, but because they’re all bound together on their way to obscurity. By this time next century, we may not even be able to read, and that assumes we’re here at all. And on that upbeat note, this seems like a good time to have a hot dog and a beer, which is something no Faulkner character does in these stories.

[Madly Jane · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are few writers as good as Faulkner, too few men who understand that line of ambivalence in the minds of all men and women. Faulkner's fiction is not something that you can easily label, a point on the map where you can put your finger. His fiction is the unease of the heart and soul. It moves far beyond the borders of the South. It is about time, place, and isolation. No one writes about the meaning of time better than Faulkner. No writer ever. It's beautiful fiction. It's absolutely heartbreaking, crushing, and yet, full of hope.

It took me six months of my life, reading a bit almost every day to read these stories and think about them. Faulkner is our (USA) greatest writer.

[Mostafa · Rating 4 out of 5]

سرخپوست می رود مجموعه ای شامل ۵ داستان کوتاه با عنوان میسترال ، هنرمند در خانه ، سرخپوست می رود ، شکاف یخی و سنجاق سینه که داستان های هنرمند در خانه، سرخپوست می رود و سنجاق سینه را بسبار خواندنی تر یافتم.
ادبیات فاکنر، بر گرفته از جریان سیال ذهن است. نویسنده در لحظه آنچه که به ذهن شخصیت های داستان می آید را واگویه می کند. به خاطر همین شاید شاهد برخی پراکنده گویی ها باشیم... با این اوصاف طرفداران فاکنر با این شیوه روایت داستان اوست که او را همواره ستایش می کنند

[Ian Gillibrand · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very atmospheric collection of stories in an era and part of the United States that felt anything but united.

Memorable characters fleshed out in idiosyncratic vernacular language on occasion that had me (as a Brit) scratching my head on more than the odd occasion before realising what Faulkner was having his character expressing.

On balance I still prefer the brilliant short stories of William Trevor but that is probably more down to the familiarity of the setting and Faulkner deserves no less than 4 stars for a phenomenal piece of world building.

[Serena · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've been told Fitzgerald is the epitome of a short story writer. After reading this book, I respectfully disagree. The Chicago Tribune got it right when it said that "There is not a story in this book which does not have elements of great fiction." Even if I did not particularly like the story or understand it at first, it is impossible not see Faulkner's mastery of the craft.

Stories I liked:

"Hair"

"Dry September": Reminded me so much of a twisted version of To Kill a Mockingbird I wondered if Harper Lee was in anyway influenced by this short story.

"Elly"

"That Will Be Fine": The best use of a child narrator in this book.

"That Evening Sun": CREEPY.

"Crevasse"

"Turnabout"

"All the Dead Pilots"

"Wash"

"Honor": Although Mildred annoyed me, I still enjoyed the story.

"Pennsylvania Station": A backwards version of the American Dream.

"Mountain Victory"

"Beyond": Found it twistedly funny.

"Mistral"

Time to go find a collection of Fitzgerald's short stories and compare.

[Iluvatar . · Rating 5 out of 5]

First, my edition is 450 pages and is divided into Two main parts.
I loved all the short stories that I read
A rose for Emily
Dry September
That evening sun
Barn burning
Bear hunt
Two soldiers
Tall men

[Mat · Rating 4 out of 5]

For many years I read the novels of William Faulkner and both lamented and loved his deliberately obfuscatory prose. I've always admired someone who smiles in the face of all stolid conventions and tries to break out on his/her own and find new ground.

Well, he certainly did achieve that. Faulkner once said that he was a "failed poet" and although I have yet to ready his poetry I somewhat understood what he meant through reading this book. The way he writes can only work through his singular prose - that's how I felt and instinctively thought that it might not work in verse. The reverse is often true as well, as I have encountered many poets who have tried to write prose (usually novels) and have mostly been unsuccessful, with the occasional, sporadic all-rounder genius popping up here and there.

As for his prose, I have come to feel that he is rather inconsistent. He ranges from very dull, boring and opaque right up to the soaring heights of some of the most scintillating prose I have read. My favorite story in this collection by far was the one called 'Mistral' which is set in Italy during one of the World Wars. It's beautifully written and Faulkner skilfully threads the story together like a master putting beads onto a string one by one to make a beautiful necklace. There are a few other fantastic short stories here such as 'A Rose for Entity' and 'Ad Astra' just to name a few. There are quite a few easily forgettable ones as well and some which will just leaving you scratching your head wondering what on earth old Willie was on about.

A word to the wise - do NOT get this Kindle version. It's HORRIBLE. It is filled with typos and mistakes and incorrect fonts and stories mishmashed together, overlapping - very confusing and very uncool. I guess what can you expect when you only pay 108 yen (incl. tax) for a digital book, right?

Due to lack of shelf space, I decided to just go with the Kindle version but realized that reading Faulkner properly requires a proper traditional book in front of you or at least a better Kindle version.

All in all, if you are a Faulkner fan, you will probably love this - as it features both more difficult Faulkner and more accessible Faulkner. His favorite topics also appear - Yoknapatawpha County, airplane barnstorming, WWI soldiers, wine and whiskey and women and you name it. And even if you are like me, finding that you sometimes like Faulkner but other times don't, you will inevitable come across at least one or two amazing sentences in EACH story in this book, ones that will leave you breathless or having you go back and reread them to catch a glimpse of their beauty before they fade before your eyes. Faulkner is a great writer and worth reading. I just wished that he was a little more consistent, a little less verbose and circulatory, and most of all wish that Kindle would put out a more decent version of this book! These things aside, it's definitely worth picking up a copy of this and if you can afford the price and space, get it in paperback and do yourself a favor, fill up a glass of warm whisky and bask in the glow of this legendary southern-gothic writer.

[Nathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I thought reading both Faulkner and Hemingway's collected stories in the first half of this year would help me pick one author over the other as a favorite. It did not. Both are brilliant. Both wrote novels I adore. Both wrote strong short stories, some of which are among the very best short stories written in the past century. Still, they're very different. Faulkner is tougher, more lush in language and maybe a little more contemplative/pondering. Whether those qualities are virtues or not all depends on your personality and mood.

[Descending Angel · Rating 5 out of 5]

42 short stories, most range from 20 to 30 pages long giving each story time to develop and be satisfying, not a bad story here, all of them are worth reading and cover all of Faulkner's themes ~ love, race, family, history, community. 10 highlights are: "barn burning" "a rose for emily" "hair" "that will be fine" "that evening sun" "ad astra" "the brooch" "golden land" "mistral" and "the tall men"

[Rick Slane · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Uncle Willy" is the story I enjoyed the most. It's about a small town morphine addicted pharmacy owner that some do-gooders try to get clean. I liked "A Bear Hunt" too. I had a grandparents that spoke like the people in the country section of stories.

[Pyramids Ubiquitous · Rating 4 out of 5]

Faulkner's Collected Stories provides a rich panoply of southern existence, but also exposes some of his rare shortcomings as a writer. While many of these stories do provide some of Faulkner's more accessible prose, the form in itself is not always a good fit for his complicated name-and-thought-soup. Most of the stories are only about 20 pages, but the family lineages are just as complicated as any of his novels which makes them incredibly ineffective. The stories simply don't have the depth that would warrant such active reading, either, so many of the stories just become frustrating to read.

His observations are always cutting, even if there is much more of the mundane here. Even the most trivial of these stories have at least one great line of dialogue or section of prose. There are certainly standouts that display Faulkner's unmatched skill with the written word, but there are also many that I would never want to read again. While there are many great quotes throughout, I did expect more quotables from 900 pages of Faulkner - many of the stories do give the sense that he is holding back or trying to appeal to a broader base. Still, it is Faulkner and even Faulkner at his worst is a spectacle.

Best Stories: Barn Burning, The Tall Men, Two Soldiers, A Rose for Emily, Hair, Uncle Willy, Ad Astra, The Brooch, Golden Land, Mistral

[Amir Hossein · Rating 1 out of 5]

نمی دونم چرا جذب این کتاب و برخی کتب دیگر از نویسندگان آمریکایی نشدم.

[محمد أحمد خليفة · Rating 3 out of 5]

قد يكون الإغراق في المحلية سلاحًا ذو حدين فيما يخص كتابة العمل الأدبي ومدى تقبله وذيوع صيته بين أوساط القراء على مستوى العالم. فنجيب محفوظ فاز بجائزة نوبل لأن مجمل أعماله كان يدور في الحارة المصرية التي كانت قبله لا يعرف عنها جمهور القراء العالمي شيئًا، أما هنا في المجموعة القصصية المعنونة "نحو النجوم وقصص أخرى" لوليام فوكنر الكاتب الأمريكي الحائز على جائزة نوبل عام ١٩٤٩م، فهو بالمثل كانت رواياته الكبرى الشهيرة تدور حول بيئة الجنوب الأمريكي، وهي التي كانت السبب في ذيوع صيته عالميًا، لكن في هذه المجموعة القصصية التي تدور بالكامل في أجواء الحرب العالمية الأولى لا نجد ما يدعونا للقراءة بشغف، ولا ما يدفعنا لأن نكمل اكثر من قصتين أو ثلاث على الأكثر، أي ما يعادل نصف قصص الكتاب.
بادئ ذي بدء، فإن القصص التي تحويها هذه المجموعة هي على الترتيب: عجب عجاب، نحو النجوم، انتصار، الصدع، مبادلة، وكل الطيارين الموتى.
الترجمة ممتازة لا غبار عليها بقلم الكاتب والشاعر الفلسطيني سامر أبو هواش، بل إني أود أن أقدم خالص الشكر للمترجم القدير على تلك الحواشي والهوامش التي أماط فيها اللثام عن كثير من الأمور والمتعلقات شديدة الغموض والخصوصية فيما يخص الحرب العالمية الأولى في ترجمته لقصص المجموعة، والتي إن لم يضمنها ترجمته، لما كان من الممكن بالفعل فهم الكثير والكثير من الأحداث والتفاصيل التي توضح للقارئ ما قد يخفى عليه أو لا يمكنه فهمه.
القصص فيما عدا عجب عجاب ومبادلة وكل الطيارين الموتى مفهومة إلى حد كبير برغم خصوصية الحدث الذي ترويه، ولولا الترجمة والهوامش لما كان من الممكن أن تكون واضحة لدرجة الفهم، أما التي ذكرتها فهي غير مفهومة إلى حد كبير، وكأن الكاتب يروي لك أحداثًا تعرفها حق المعرفة، في حين أنها تخص الحرب العالمية الأولى التي عاصرها هو لا أنت، وهذا هو الخطأ الذي يمكنني أن أضع يدي عليه هنا، فحين قامت الحرب العالمية الأولى في عام ١٩١٤ كان عمر وليام فوكنر سبعة عشر عامًا، فهو قد عاصر الحرب وهو مدرك لأحداثها وقابل الكثير من الجنود في محيط العائلة والأصدقاء وأبناء الوطن، ليعرف منهم تفاصيلها الدقيقة، فكان أولى به أن يصف ما يحكي عنه بطريقة تجعل القارئ في أي زمان ومكان يفهم ما يرويه، لكنه يحكي في قصصه وكأنه يخاطب أقرانه الذين عاصروا الحرب، لا القراء من أبناء الأجيال التي ستحيا في المستقبل ولا تفهم تفاصيل التفاصيل التي يحكي عنها. ليت الأمر اقتصر على ذلك، لكن القصص نفسها تفتقد عنصر التشويق والحدث الذي يجعل القارئ يقبل على قراءة القصص ليعرف ماذا سوف يحدث في النهاية، فلا يوجد حدث رئيس في أغلب القصص، بل سرد لذكريات وحكايات ولقاءات بطريقة تصيب القارئ بالملل، ولا يجد في نفسه الرغبة لمعرفة شيء هو نفسه لا يفهم ما الذي يرويه الكاتب بخصوصه في الأساس!
ربما كانت تجربتي الأولى هذه مع فوكنر غير سارة بالنسبة لي كقارئ، لكنني آمل أن تكون التجارب القادمة مع رواياته أفضل بكثير.

[Derek · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a massive book. I had no idea Faulkner wrote so many stories in so many different styles. The quality of these stories is wildly uneven, but the stories as a whole show creativity, ambition, and, of course, immense talent. Many of these stories were integrated into the novels. Many have important things to say about race, memory, class, and all of the other usual Faulkner themes. Many are gothic in tone, or even surreal. Some attempt to deal with Native Americans. Others, and these are usually though not always the less interesting stories, deal with war.