AS I LAY DYING; "The Bear" included in GO DOWN, MOSES (1942) by William Faulkner

“People to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.”
--from AS I LAY DYING

Vintage Books & Anchor Books

“People to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.”
- from AS I LAY DYING by William Faulkner

As I Lay Dying is Faulkner’s harrowing account of the Bundren family’s odyssey across the Mississippi countryside to bury Addie, their wife and mother. Narrated in turn by each of the family members—including Addie herself—as well as others the novel ranges in mood, from dark comedy to the deepest pathos. Considered one of the most influential novels in American fiction in structure, style, and drama, As I Lay Dying is a true 20th-century classic.

http://knopfdoubleday.com/book/48374/as-i-lay-dying/

GO DOWN, MOSES, William Faulkner’s greatest collections of short stories, was published on this day in 1942.

"He was only ten. It seemed to him that he could see them, the two of them, shadowy in the limbo from which time emerged and became time: the old bear absolved of mortality and himself who shared a little of it. Because he recognised now what he had smelled in the huddled dogs and tasted in his own saliva, recognised fear as a boy, a youth recognises the existence of love and passion and experience which is his heritage but not yet his patrimony, from entering by chance the presence of perhaps even merely the bedroom of a woman who has loved and been loved by many men."
--from "The Bear" included in GO DOWN, MOSES (1942)

GO DOWN, MOSES is composed of seven interrelated stories, all of them set in Faulkner’s mythic Yoknapatawpha County. From a variety of perspectives, Faulkner examines the complex, changing relationships between blacks and whites, between man and nature, weaving a cohesive novel rich in implication and insight. READ more here: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/…/go-down-moses-by-will…/