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"Alternating Current" by Octavio Paz A scintillating thinker and a prescient voice on emerging world culture, Paz reveals himself here as “a man of electrical passions, paradoxical visions, alternating currents of thoughts, and feeling that runs hot but never cold. Learn more | See related books
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This book contains the key short stories and novel excerpts that caused Faulkner's reputation to soar beginning in the mid-1940s. Although he had been active since the 1920s, this book was the one that made him a household word.
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When you see a book with the title "The Portable Anything", you may figure it a handy compendium, digestible in relatively short order to give you a feeling about something without running you through the gauntlet.
What you may not expect are two of the longest sentences in the American literary canon, one alone running some 35 close-set pages; double-parentheses; 100-page stream-of-consciousness narratives about bad horses and deadly bear hunts, and churning through names like Eck Snopes and Tomey's Turl. Unless maybe the book is "The Portable Faulkner", in which case what you are dealing with is not a title but an oxymoron.
There's nothing simple about Faulkner. Even ordinary things come out convoluted, like graffiti, "the gross and simple terms of his gross and simple lusts and yearnings, the gross and simple recapitulations of his gross and simple heart" as described near the beginning of that 35-page sentence in "The Jail". Forensic science is easy compared to making headway of a plot like "Old Man" or "Was". In short, Faulkner's hard to read, and Malcolm Cowley's book doesn't make him any easier by picking these three pieces and other examples of Faulkner's singularly manic density as nuggets for sampling.
For Cowley, who first put this together in 1946, the goal was to rescue Faulkner from obscurity. It seemed to work. Largely unregarded except by other notable American writers (Hemingway touted him in "Death In The Afternoon"), Faulkner emerged over the next few years as a Southern-fried combination of Poe and Hawthorne, of dreams and morality served up in the messy racial and generational gumbo of the American South. It culminated in his winning the 1950 Nobel Prize for Literature, and his reputation has not only endured but prevailed ever since.Read more ›
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This item: The Portable Faulkner (Penguin Classics)
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