Recommendations
Books Like As I Lay Dying
Best books to read after As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
As I Lay Dying is Faulkner's most accessible difficult novel — darkly comic, formally audacious, and told through fifteen narrators including the dead Addie Bundren herself. If the novel's formal brilliance and its portrait of a family's dark journey moved you, these books share its formal innovation, its grotesque humor, and its concern with how individual consciousness shapes what we are able to know.
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Buy on AmazonThe Sound and the Fury
by William Faulkner
The essential companion to As I Lay Dying — the Compson family's disintegration told through four radically different perspectives; more formally challenging but the complete picture of Faulkner's early achievement; the two novels together constitute the most complete portrait of Southern family dysfunction in American fiction
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Buy on AmazonLight in August
by William Faulkner
The most accessible of Faulkner's major novels and the one that most explicitly states the moral vision that As I Lay Dying enacts through darkly comic form; the essential companion showing Faulkner's range, from the grotesque humor of the Bundren journey to the tragic grandeur of Joe Christmas's story
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Buy on AmazonMrs Dalloway
by Virginia Woolf
Woolf's novel — multiple interior monologues, collapsed time, individual consciousness as the primary material — is the British parallel to Faulkner's formal experiments; the comparison between As I Lay Dying and Mrs Dalloway shows the transatlantic reach of literary modernism's formal revolution and how two very different writers were responding to the same formal possibilities
- 4Buy on Amazon
The Road
by Cormac McCarthy
McCarthy's post-apocalyptic novel about a father and son walking south through a dead landscape shares As I Lay Dying's portrait of a family journey that is simultaneously practical and mythic, and McCarthy's stripped, declarative prose style draws directly on Faulkner's influence; both are about what families do when they carry the dead
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Buy on AmazonBlood Meridian
by Cormac McCarthy
McCarthy's most Faulknerian novel — the violence of American expansion in the 1840s borderlands, rendered in prose of biblical grandeur; the most extreme example of how Faulkner's influence transformed into something entirely different in McCarthy's hands
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Buy on AmazonIn the Penal Colony
by Franz Kafka
Kafka's short story about a torture machine and its operator is the European modernist parallel to As I Lay Dying's concern with systems (social, mechanical, bureaucratic) that people inhabit and obey without questioning whether they should; both are about the violence that human beings do to each other in the name of order
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Buy on AmazonBeloved
by Toni Morrison
Morrison's novel about slavery's aftermath includes the dead Sethe's daughter Beloved as a physical presence — making it the most direct heir to As I Lay Dying's formal innovation of letting the dead speak (Addie's chapter, the literal presence of her rotting body); both novels understand that the dead cannot be buried without being acknowledged
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Buy on AmazonThe Waves
by Virginia Woolf
Woolf's most formally radical novel — six characters speaking in alternating monologues across their entire lives, with no conventional narration at all — is the closest British parallel to As I Lay Dying's formal innovation; both novels ask the same question: what does consciousness actually look like, and can fiction capture it without falsifying it?
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