Recommendations
Books Like Absalom, Absalom!
Best books to read after Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
Absalom, Absalom! is Faulkner's most ambitious novel and his own favorite — the story of Thomas Sutpen's rise and fall, told through multiple unreliable narrators who are each trying and failing to make it make sense. If the novel's formal brilliance and its portrait of the South's historical wound moved you, these books share its concern with how the past is constructed through storytelling and how the history that cannot be confronted continues to destroy those who inherit it.
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The Sound and the Fury
by William Faulkner
The essential companion to Absalom, Absalom! — the Compson family (whose Quentin is one of Absalom's key narrators) disintegrating through four radically different perspectives; the two novels are so deeply interconnected that reading both is the only way to understand either fully
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Go Down, Moses
by William Faulkner
Faulkner's linked story collection about the McCaslin family — organized around the same themes of race, inheritance, and the moral burden of Southern history that Absalom, Absalom! introduces; essential for understanding the full scope of the Yoknapatawpha project and how Faulkner continued to develop the material after Absalom
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Beloved
by Toni Morrison
Morrison's novel about slavery's aftermath — the ghost of a dead child haunting her mother — is the most important American novel to engage directly with the historical material that Absalom, Absalom! approaches through the story of Thomas Sutpen; where Faulkner approaches race and slavery through white narrators trying to reconstruct history, Morrison approaches it through the direct experience of those who suffered
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One Hundred Years of Solitude
by Gabriel García Márquez
García Márquez acknowledged Faulkner as one of his primary literary ancestors, and One Hundred Years of Solitude is the most celebrated non-American heir to Absalom, Absalom!'s multigenerational saga of a family founding and destroying itself; the Latin American magical realist mode that Faulkner's Southern Gothic helped inspire
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The Remains of the Day
by Kazuo Ishiguro
Ishiguro's novel about an English butler who has constructed his entire self around an ideal (of professional dignity, of service to a great house) that turns out to have been based on a moral error — a contemporary parallel to Sutpen's 'design': a man who organizes his life around a grand plan and discovers too late that the plan was built on a fundamental wrong
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Blood Meridian
by Cormac McCarthy
McCarthy is the writer most obviously descended from Faulkner in American fiction, and Blood Meridian is his most Faulknerian work — the violence of American expansion in the 1840s Texas borderlands, narrated in prose of biblical grandeur; the most unflinching contemporary examination of the violence at the foundation of American history that Absalom, Absalom! approaches through the South
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Light in August
by William Faulkner
The most accessible of Faulkner's major novels — the natural entry point if Absalom, Absalom! was your first Faulkner and proved too difficult; or the essential companion if you read it first and want to continue through Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha world
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The Known World
by Edward P. Jones
Jones's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about Black slaveholders in antebellum Virginia is the most formally Faulknerian of recent American novels — multiple narrators, collapsed chronology, and the same concern with how the past haunts the present that Absalom, Absalom! makes its central formal and thematic preoccupation
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