Great Story's - dated

The story's are of their time very enjoyable. They would not suit the PC brigade.

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Wonderrful voices

I've loved William Faulkner's novels all my adult life. His stories of the South are satisfying and authentic (as far as I know) but the war time stories and later tales leave me wondering why he moved away from familiar ground.
The narrators are everything I could wish for - and I give a special mention to Arthur Morey. His voice is simply magical.

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“Already fled without moving”

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/A

Any 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.

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2 people found this helpful

Lazy lazy Audible

Sorry it’s time for a rant: how is it possible that an organisation can spend hours of recording time, but not bother to electronically catalogue the chapters so that the listener can gauge where he is within the “series”…. Imagine if you were to try and figure out where you are on a Netflix series, and you open Netflix, only to find there are no references to say, 30 episodes of a series. This is why Audible needs to step up its labelling

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2 people found this helpful