The Sound and the Fury - (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) by William Faulkner (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

The masterpiece of Nobel Prize winner William Faulkner, now in Penguin Classics for the first time, with a new introduction by Ayana Mathis, the New York Times bestselling author of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie

One of The Atlantic's Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years

A Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition, with flaps and deckle-edged paper

The Sound and the Fury traces the decline of the American South through three generations of the once-powerful Compson family. In Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi--perhaps the most famous fictional setting in American literature--antiquated ideas of race, class, and sex prevail among the erstwhile landed gentry of the Reconstruction-era South, embodied in the Compson siblings: Benjy, whose mental disability blurs the past and the present; Quentin, who is consumed by his obsession with his family's honor; Jason, who unleashes his blind rage on the rest of the household, especially their longtime Black servant, Dilsey; and their elusive sister, Caddy, whose tragic estrangement sets in motion the family's fall from grace. A kaleidoscopic narrative punctuated by haunting interior monologues, The Sound and the Fury brings to life Faulkner's aristocratic South as a land of decadence and despair, gallantry and greed in the face of financial and moral ruin. What Faulkner once considered his "most splendid failure" was also his favorite of his novels; it now ranks among the greatest novels of the twentieth century, and as one of the cornerstones of American fiction.

Review Quotes

"Astounding . . . Fiercely singular . . . With every new reading, it rewards my devotion by revealing some previously unseen nuance. . . . It is evergreen, as relevant today as when it was published nearly one hundred years ago. . . . It is beautiful. . . . Faulkner's beauty is formidable, pugilistic even, it irrupts into our senses and sensibilities. . . . To read Faulkner is to grapple with the endlessly reverberating history described in his pages. . . . [His is] a voice that cuts through the detritus of false narrative, false history, false senses of self. A voice that tells us about who we are and who we have been, and warns us about where we are headed." --Ayana Mathis, from the Introduction

About the Author

William Faulkner (1897-1962) won the Nobel Prize in Literature for what are recognized as some of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, among them The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1932), and Absalom, Absalom! (1936). For many of his literary chronicles of life in the American South, he drew on his native Mississippi, which informed one of his greatest creations, the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, where a number of his novels are set. In addition to the Nobel Prize, he won the National Book Award twice, for Collected Stories (1951) and A Fable (1954), and the Pulitzer Prize twice, for A Fable and The Reivers (1962).

Ayana Mathis (introduction) is the author of the New York Times bestselling Oprah's Book Club pick The Twelve Tribes of Hattie and the award-winning The Unsettled, as well as a series of essays for The New York Times on literature and faith. She teaches in Hunter College's MFA program.