William Faulkner's fifth published novel, As I Lay Dying (1930), is a self-described tour de force that the author cranked out in roughly two months while working as the night manager at the University of Mississippi power plant in his hometown of Oxford. This dark tragicomedy about a family on a quest to bury its matriarch helped win the author his early reputation for sadistically heaping woe and misfortune upon his Southern grotesques but has more recently come to be seen as a complex artistic effort to empathize with the often marginalized rural population in America whose supposed primitivism leads to the caricatures found in Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road and God's Little Acre, two contemporaneous novels. Telling the story of the Bundren family through fifteen different narrators and a tapestry of styles that weaves dialect with hypnotic poetry, Faulkner crafted a tightly plotted but expansively interiorized tale in which unforgettable characters such as Addie, Darl, Dewey Dell, and Vardaman cope with grief, language, and understanding. If you've ever wondered why the phrase "My mother is a fish" is a meme, this podcast is for you.
Episode 8: Beloved and Ghosts of the Past, the Present, and Possibly the Future
Episode 7–All that Jazz: F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby
Episode 6: Watching the Horizon in THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD
Episode 5: Blending Black and White in ABSALOM, ABSALOM!
Episode 4: Returning to THE AGE OF INNOCENCE
Episode 3: Seeing Ralph Ellison's INVISIBLE MAN Clearly
Episode 2: Diving with MOBY DICK
Definitions and Debates: What Exactly is a GAN?
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free
50 Tastes Of Gray
Dear Alice | Interior Design
Spider-Man Crawlspace Podcast
The Count of Monte Cristo
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
The Magnus Archives
The Moth