The Wild Palms

In this feverishly beautiful novel—originally titled If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem—William Faulkner interweaves two narratives, each wholly absorbing in its own right, each subtly illuminating the other. In New Orleans in 1937, a man and a woman embark on a headlong flight into the wilderness of illicit passion, fleeing her husband and the temptations of respectability. In Mississippi ten years earlier, a convict sets forth across a flooded river, risking his own chance at freedom to rescue a pregnant woman. From these separate stories Faulkner composes a symphony of deliverance and damnation, survival and self-sacrifice, a novel in which elemental danger is juxtaposed with fatal injuries of the spirit. The Wild Palms is grandly inventive, heart-stopping in its prose, and suffused on every page with the physical presence of the country that Faulkner made his own.

• Sanctuary: The Corrected Text
• Absalom, Absalom! The Corrected Text
• The Hamlet
• Go Down, Moses
• Flags in the Dust (Vintage International)
• Light in August
• The Unvanquished: The Corrected Text
• Collected Stories of William Faulkner
• The Reivers
• Intruder in the Dust