Absalom, Absalom! (Vintage International)

Read, read, read. Read everything trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You ll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you ll find out. If it s not, throw it out the window. William Faulkner

Absalom, Absalom! is Faulkner s epic tale of Thomas Sutpen, an enigmatic stranger who comes to Jefferson, Mississippi, in the early 1830s to wrest his mansion out of the muddy bottoms of the north Mississippi wilderness. He was a man, Faulkner said, who wanted sons and the sons destroyed him.