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FICTION: Endless Love, Scott Spencer Passion Play, Jerzy Kosinski Shikasta, Doris Lessing The Executioner's Song, Norman Mailer The Ghost Writer, Philip Roth The Green Ripper, John D. MacDonald Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner, edited by Joseph Blotner
Although he labored in obscurity throughout his early career, William Faulkner lived to see an academic cottage industry grow up around his books. Since his death, in 1962, the business has boomed into a vast factory, belching out theses, dissertations, books, articles, catalogues of trivia, notes and querulousness. Raw material is naturally at a premium. If a single word that Faulkner wrote and neglected to destroy has not been discovered, some professorial truffle hound will doubtless find and publish...
...Uncollected Stories proves that the law of diminishing returns has a loophole. Until now, only some 50 of Faulkner's short stories were available in book form. Editor Joseph Blotner has rounded up 45 more, 14 of them previously unpublished anywhere. The book as a whole rarely reaches the brilliance sustained throughout Faulkner's Collected Stories (1950). No matter. Blotner has salvaged a number of fine stories from back-issue oblivion and, in the process, presented an intriguing portrait of the artist as a commercial traveler...
...Faulkner spent his prime writing years perpetually strapped for cash. The energy poured into novels like The Sound and the Fury (1929) and As I Lay Dying (1930) netted him almost nothing, and the private squirearchy he was establishing in Oxford, Miss., cost money. Hollywood offered him periodic stints of screen writing, and these paid some bills. The marketplace for short fiction provided another recourse. Luckily for Faulkner, at the time it was enormous: the Saturday Evening Post, Collier's, American Mercury, American Magazine, This Week, Woman's Home Companion, Country Gentleman, Scribner's magazine. Faulkner received...
...Blotner's notes make clear, Faulkner accepted editorial quibbles and orders to revise or rewrite with little complaint; it comes as something of a surprise to watch the future Nobel laureate acceding to the demands of the popular press. As a result of such proddings, Faulkner's magazine stories were usually simpler, more straightforward and less resonant than his finest work. Reprinted in Uncollected Stories, these early versions inspire a sense of deja vu, for Faulkner frequently expanded and reshaped his published stories and inserted them in novels. A tale of his called The Bear appeared...