William Faulkner

"Oh, Mr. Faulkner, Do You Write?" A one-man show presented by The Walnut Street Theatre Company. Written by John Maxwell with Tom Dupree, and starring Maxwell as William Faulkner. Directed by William Partlan, set design by Jimmy Robertson, with set dressing by Jack Stevens, lighting by Tina Charney, costume by Martha Wood. At Walnut Street Theater's Studio Theatre 5, 9th & Walnut streets, through April 6. Striding from the rear of the theater, the man with the authentic Deep South accent growls at reporters: "What do y'all want?

Jody Varner - the ninth of his parents' 16 children, "a prime, bulging man, slightly thyroidic" - is considering some disturbing news about his new tenant. "Hell fire," he murmurs. "Hell fire. " The man is a barnburner. Or, leastways, "he was kind of involved in it after a fashion you might say. " This is the way of conversation in William Faulkner's world. The men gather to speculate on the news, sucking air through their teeth and spitting into the road. They say such things as "sho now" and "I reckon.

The U.S. Postal Service tomorrow will honor one of its former employees, William Faulkner, the Nobel Prize-winning author, with a 22-cent commemorative in the Literary Arts Series. One of the great American authors, Faulkner was one of the worst postal workers. First-day ceremonies will be held in Oxford, Miss., in conjunction with a conference this week at the University of Mississippi that's expected to draw Faulkner scholars from around the world. The dark green stamp design shows Faulkner smoking his pipe.

Adapting The Sound and the Fury to the stage invites the sort of response that someone once proposed for a talking dog: It's not so much what the animal says that counts, but simply the fact that it says anything at all. William Faulkner's book isn't simply one of the best novels in American literature, it's also one of the most daunting. Not only does it prismatically relate its multigenerational saga through four different points of view, but it narrates two of those perspectives in a stream of consciousness that rivals anything this side of James Joyce.

DESCENDANTS OF AUTHORS WRITE ENDING TO OLD FEUD A long cold war between two literary titans is about to come to an end. It seems that the niece of William Faulkner and the son of Ernest Hemingway plan to get together next month to bury the literary hatchet over an old misunderstanding. Faulkner's niece, Dean Faulkner Wells, an author in his home town, Oxford, Miss., plans to meet next month with Jack Hemingway, son of Ernest Hemingway. The split goes back to the mid-1950s, when Faulkner told a University of Mississippi writing class that Hemingway was afraid to take chances in his fiction.

Should a theatergoer expect a one-man show about William Faulkner to enlighten him, at least a little, about Faulkner the writer? He is, after all, regarded by many as the greatest American writer of the century. The answer to that question from this corner is, yes, one should come away from a show about Faulkner with some understanding of why he became a writer, some knowledge of the course of his writing career and some appreciation of why his books are held in such high esteem.

OPRAH WINFREY, what are you thinking? William Faulkner? Have you ever read Faulkner? Faulkner is dense, serious stuff, Oprah, rich with language. Do you really want your loyal fans to read Faulkner? Are you going to help them through the difficult passages? Answer their calls at 3 a.m. when they can't sleep because they didn't understand Page 43 (or pages 1 through 42). This time, you've gone too far. But your power is unmistakable. Within 24 hours of being chosen as your summer reading pick, a boxed set of three Faulkner novels "As I Lay Dying," "The Sound and the Fury" and "Light in August" was the No. 2 seller on Amazon.

It shouldn't be much of a surprise that here in the land where things hang on too long, William Faulkner and his world have hung on a long time. Faulkner has endured. But it hasn't been as a tourist attraction, the apotheosis of the Southern Writer. And he hasn't endured simply as a regular guy remembered 24 years after his death. Faulkner has survived as something harder to put your hands on, something akin to one of his characters. He is, in this town, recalled as a physical presence, a man of few spoken words, an enigma.

They're enlisting the rainbow to help an American masterpiece tell its tale the way its author intended, for the first time.   Using inks in 14 different colors, the Folio Society, based in London, has printed The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (2 vols., $345, www.foliosociety.com) the way the Nobel Prize winner said he wanted it. Neil Titman, commissioning editor for the Folio Society, calls The Sound and the Fury "the most successful limited edition we've ever had. " The society's website says "over 1,000" of the 1,480 copies ("there will be no more," says Titman)

Many tributes to Robert Penn Warren reflect the curious idea that Southern writers are the redwood trees of American letters: If you've seen or read one, you've seen or read them all. Warren was Southern and a writer. But no career more completely discredited the stereotype of the "Southern writer. " Consider the idea that he was, or pretended to be, William Faulkner's "successor," one of the staples of the obituary notices. Warren would have laughed at the idea. He knew that Faulkner was an absolute genius, and like all geniuses had neither predecessors nor successors.

They're enlisting the rainbow to help an American masterpiece tell its tale the way its author intended, for the first time.   Using inks in 14 different colors, the Folio Society, based in London, has printed The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (2 vols., $345, www.foliosociety.com) the way the Nobel Prize winner said he wanted it. Neil Titman, commissioning editor for the Folio Society, calls The Sound and the Fury "the most successful limited edition we've ever had. " The society's website says "over 1,000" of the 1,480 copies ("there will be no more," says Titman)

OPRAH WINFREY, what are you thinking? William Faulkner? Have you ever read Faulkner? Faulkner is dense, serious stuff, Oprah, rich with language. Do you really want your loyal fans to read Faulkner? Are you going to help them through the difficult passages? Answer their calls at 3 a.m. when they can't sleep because they didn't understand Page 43 (or pages 1 through 42). This time, you've gone too far. But your power is unmistakable. Within 24 hours of being chosen as your summer reading pick, a boxed set of three Faulkner novels "As I Lay Dying," "The Sound and the Fury" and "Light in August" was the No. 2 seller on Amazon.

Jody Varner - the ninth of his parents' 16 children, "a prime, bulging man, slightly thyroidic" - is considering some disturbing news about his new tenant. "Hell fire," he murmurs. "Hell fire. " The man is a barnburner. Or, leastways, "he was kind of involved in it after a fashion you might say. " This is the way of conversation in William Faulkner's world. The men gather to speculate on the news, sucking air through their teeth and spitting into the road. They say such things as "sho now" and "I reckon.

DESCENDANTS OF AUTHORS WRITE ENDING TO OLD FEUD A long cold war between two literary titans is about to come to an end. It seems that the niece of William Faulkner and the son of Ernest Hemingway plan to get together next month to bury the literary hatchet over an old misunderstanding. Faulkner's niece, Dean Faulkner Wells, an author in his home town, Oxford, Miss., plans to meet next month with Jack Hemingway, son of Ernest Hemingway. The split goes back to the mid-1950s, when Faulkner told a University of Mississippi writing class that Hemingway was afraid to take chances in his fiction.

Adapting The Sound and the Fury to the stage invites the sort of response that someone once proposed for a talking dog: It's not so much what the animal says that counts, but simply the fact that it says anything at all. William Faulkner's book isn't simply one of the best novels in American literature, it's also one of the most daunting. Not only does it prismatically relate its multigenerational saga through four different points of view, but it narrates two of those perspectives in a stream of consciousness that rivals anything this side of James Joyce.

Many tributes to Robert Penn Warren reflect the curious idea that Southern writers are the redwood trees of American letters: If you've seen or read one, you've seen or read them all. Warren was Southern and a writer. But no career more completely discredited the stereotype of the "Southern writer. " Consider the idea that he was, or pretended to be, William Faulkner's "successor," one of the staples of the obituary notices. Warren would have laughed at the idea. He knew that Faulkner was an absolute genius, and like all geniuses had neither predecessors nor successors.

It's one of the earliest songs I can remember hearing on the radio, which was our link, our cultural arbiter - in short, our television when I was growing up in Shreveport. Those were the Radio Days, as Woody Allen would call his memoir of a movie, and the song was Phil Harris singing "That's What I Like About the South. " Like everything that I associated with the South, it was not serious but a reprieve from all things serious - the daily news, the store, Hebrew School . . . . Growing up, there were decisions to be made, work to be done, obligations to be fulfilled, but the South just came naturally.

Molkho, the protagonist of Israeli writer A.B. Yehoshua's latest novel, Five Seasons, shares much with his creator. He is 51; Yehoshua is 52. He was born in Jerusalem but doesn't much care for it; Yehoshua, the same. He lives in Haifa, in an apartment overlooking a wadi leading to the Mediterranean Sea; so does Yehoshua. Molkho (under whose name the novel was published in Hebrew) is a fifth- generation Sephardic Jew; Yehoshua is fifth-generation on his father's side (first on his mother's)

The U.S. Postal Service tomorrow will honor one of its former employees, William Faulkner, the Nobel Prize-winning author, with a 22-cent commemorative in the Literary Arts Series. One of the great American authors, Faulkner was one of the worst postal workers. First-day ceremonies will be held in Oxford, Miss., in conjunction with a conference this week at the University of Mississippi that's expected to draw Faulkner scholars from around the world. The dark green stamp design shows Faulkner smoking his pipe.

It shouldn't be much of a surprise that here in the land where things hang on too long, William Faulkner and his world have hung on a long time. Faulkner has endured. But it hasn't been as a tourist attraction, the apotheosis of the Southern Writer. And he hasn't endured simply as a regular guy remembered 24 years after his death. Faulkner has survived as something harder to put your hands on, something akin to one of his characters. He is, in this town, recalled as a physical presence, a man of few spoken words, an enigma.