As I Lay Dying

Addie Bundren is dead. Her dying wish: to be buried in Jefferson, forty miles away. Her husband Anse has promised. Their five children — Darl, Jewel, Cash, Dewey Dell, and young Vardaman — will spend the next nine days crossing flooded rivers, surviving fire and flood, and exposing the full depth of their individual isolation, as each narrates the journey from their own private, unreachable interior.

Written in six weeks, told through fifteen narrators in fifty-nine sections, As I Lay Dying is Faulkner’s most formally dazzling achievement — and perhaps his most darkly, savagely funny. The Bundren family’s grotesque pilgrimage is simultaneously a black comedy of rural Mississippi life and one of literature’s most profound meditations on grief, language, and the impossibility of ever truly knowing another person.

The novel’s most famous chapter — Vardaman’s single sentence, ‘My mother is a fish’ — contains in five words more grief, more confusion, and more humanity than most novels manage in three hundred pages. A masterpiece of American literature, written at white heat. Published by Vintage.