Sound and the Fury » (Reissue)

The only place you can find Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, is in the Nobel Prize-winning fiction of William Faulkner. The imagined lives of its residents form an exploration of suffering, love and family that has been acknowledged as one of the great literary achievements of the 20th century. Along the way, Faulkner set a tone for Southern literature that influences writers decades later.

The Sound and the Fury is made up of undifferentiated streams of consciousness that ultimately turn out to be the inner voices of a family's siblings. Its construction is so masterful that the last sentence refers the reader back to the first one, as any perfect work of art might do.

Sound has the earmarks of a modern psychological study, although the book was published in 1929. It is a dramatic and harrowing tale of the Compson family's pathology—primarily in the form of incest and incestuous thoughts.