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Name: The Wild Palms

Author: William Faulkner
Year: 1939
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Genres/categories:
Classic

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ISBNs:
9780679741930
0679741933

In this feverishly beautiful novel-originally titled If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem by Faulkner, and now published in the authoritative Library of America text-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 wiht 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.