Recommendations
Books Like The Sound and the Fury
Best books to read after The Sound and the Fury by Faulkner
The Sound and the Fury tells the same story four times in four different voices — including a non-linear narrator who can't experience time — and produces one of the most devastating portraits of a family's collapse in all of fiction. If Faulkner's formal difficulty and emotional intensity stayed with you, these books share his engagement with Southern history, fragmented consciousness, and grief.
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As I Lay Dying
by William Faulkner
Faulkner's next novel — fifteen narrators including a dead woman recount the Bundren family's journey to bury their matriarch; written in six weeks and more immediately accessible than The Sound and the Fury, it is similarly committed to multiple-consciousness narration and the Gothic Southern landscape while adding a pitch-black comedy that The Sound and the Fury largely withholds
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Beloved
by Toni Morrison
Morrison wrote her dissertation on Faulkner and Woolf and explicitly engages with Faulkner's techniques of fragmented consciousness and temporal disruption while centering the enslaved community that Faulkner's fiction always positions at the periphery; Beloved and The Sound and the Fury are the two most formally challenging masterpieces of American literary fiction, and reading both illuminates what Morrison inherited and what she transformed
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Absalom, Absalom!
by William Faulkner
Faulkner's most ambitious novel — four narrators reconstruct the story of Thomas Sutpen, who arrived in Mississippi in 1833 with a scheme to found a dynasty that collapses through pride and the legacy of slavery; the densest and most rewarding of Faulkner's works and the one that most completely integrates the formal experimentation of The Sound and the Fury with historical and political argument
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One Hundred Years of Solitude
by Gabriel García Márquez
García Márquez explicitly credited Faulkner as the major influence on this novel — the multigenerational Buendía family saga of Macondo uses the same techniques of temporal compression, multiple consciousness, and the Southern Gothic grotesque that Faulkner developed in Yoknapatawpha County; the transformation of the Mississippi model into the magical realism of the Colombian tropics is one of literary history's most remarkable inheritances
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Their Eyes Were Watching God
by Zora Neale Hurston
Published eight years after The Sound and the Fury, Hurston's novel is the other major work of American Southern fiction of the 1930s modernist moment; where Faulkner's South is overwhelmingly white in its focalization, Hurston's centers Black consciousness and vernacular culture — the most necessary corrective to Faulkner's Southern geography, and a great novel in its own right
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Blood Meridian
by Cormac McCarthy
McCarthy is the heir to Faulkner among American novelists — the same commitment to language operating at the edge of comprehension, the same interest in the American South and West as theaters of violence and meaning, the same willingness to demand everything from the reader; Blood Meridian shares The Sound and the Fury's apocalyptic sense that civilization's violence is not an aberration but its truest expression
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Let the Great World Spin
by Colum McCann
McCann's novel about multiple New Yorkers in 1974 — the day Philippe Petit walked a wire between the Twin Towers — uses the same multiple-narrator structure as The Sound and the Fury to tell intersecting stories that meet at a single moment; one of the most formally accomplished contemporary American novels using the Faulknerian technique of multiple consciousness converging on shared event
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The Corrections
by Jonathan Franzen
Franzen's novel about the Lambert family's last Christmas together is the most ambitious contemporary American family novel in the Faulknerian tradition — each section follows a different family member, each rendered in a distinct prose style, each illuminating a different facet of the same family collapse; the 21st-century American literary novel most visibly indebted to The Sound and the Fury's formal structure
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