Recommendations
Books Like As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
Faulkner fiction, Southern Gothic novels, and multiple-narrator masterpieces
If As I Lay Dying absorbed you with its fifteen voices and the tragicomic absurdity of the Bundren family's journey, these eight works share its formal ambition with multiple narrators, its dark comedy of rural life, and its sense of the South as a place where the tragic and the grotesque are inseparable.
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Buy on AmazonThe Sound and the Fury
by William Faulkner
Faulkner's masterpiece — the Compson family's decline told through four sections, each illuminating the same events from a different consciousness; the fullest expression of his formal ambition and his most devastating portrait of a Southern family.
- 2
Buy on AmazonLight in August
by William Faulkner
Faulkner's most accessible major novel — Joe Christmas's story and Lena Grove's parallel journey to Jefferson; the fullest treatment of race and religion in Yoknapatawpha, and the easiest entry into his world for readers new to Faulkner.
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Buy on AmazonAbsalom, Absalom!
by William Faulkner
Faulkner's most ambitious novel — Thomas Sutpen's doomed dynasty pieced together from multiple narrators' competing accounts; the fullest expression of his historical vision of the South and the novel most often compared to As I Lay Dying in formal complexity.
- 4
Buy on AmazonThe Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
by Carson McCullers
McCullers's debut — a deaf-mute in a Georgia mill town as the confidant of four lonely people; the most accessible Southern Gothic novel of the same era, sharing Faulkner's sympathy for the isolated and the dispossessed.
- 5
Buy on AmazonWise Blood
by Flannery O'Connor
O'Connor's debut — Hazel Motes's Church Without Christ in Tennessee; the Southern Gothic mode in its most theological form, where Faulkner's is its most formal.
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Buy on AmazonTheir Eyes Were Watching God
by Zora Neale Hurston
Hurston's Florida novel of Janie Crawford's three marriages — the Black Southern literary tradition contemporary with Faulkner's White Southern literary tradition; both give the South its fullest fictional rendering.
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Buy on AmazonBlood Meridian
by Cormac McCarthy
McCarthy's violent Texas-Mexico border epic — the prose is Faulknerian in its syntactic complexity and its refusal of conventional punctuation; the most direct descendant of Faulkner's style in contemporary American fiction.
- 8Buy on Amazon
The Death of Ivan Ilyich
by Leo Tolstoy
Tolstoy's meditation on a dying man and the family that survives him — the Russian predecessor of the Bundren family's confrontation with Addie's death; both center on a death that reveals the living characters' inner truths.
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