Light in August

By: William Faulkner

Narrated by: Will Patton

Length: 15 hrs and 28 mins

Publisher's summary

Earphones Award Winner (AudioFile Magazine)

Audible is pleased to present Light in August, by Nobel Prize-winning author William Faulkner.

An Oprah's Book Club Selection regarded as one of Faulkner's greatest and most accessible novels, Light in August is a timeless and riveting story of determination, tragedy, and hope. In Faulkner's iconic Yoknapatawpha County, race, sex, and religion collide around three memorable characters searching desperately for human connection and their own identities.

Audie Award-winning narrator Will Patton lends his voice to Light in August. Patton has narrated works by Ernest Hemingway, Don DeLillo, Pat Conroy, Denis Johson, Larry McMurtry, and James Lee Burke, and brings to this performance a keen understanding of Faulkner, an authentic feel for the South, and a virtuoso narrator's touch.

As an added bonus, when you purchase our Audible Modern Vanguard production of William Faulkner's book, you'll also receive an exclusive Jim Atlas interview. This interview – where James Atlas interviews James Lee Burke about the life and work of William Faulkner – begins as soon as the audiobook ends.

Be sure to check out Faulkner's The Wild Palms as well.

This production is part of our Audible Modern Vanguard line, a collection of important works from groundbreaking authors.

©1954, 1976 William Faulkner (P)2010 Audible, Inc.

Critic reviews

• Audie Award Nominee - Best Classic Audiobook, 2011

"For all his concern with the South, Faulkner was actually seeking out the nature of man. Thus we must turn to him for that continuity of moral purpose which made for the greatness of our classics." (Ralph Ellison)

"It's impossible to overstate the difficulties facing Will Patton as he undertakes a reading of this Faulkner classic. It's not simply the matter of conveying early-twentieth-century Southern backwoods dialects. That, a skilled mimic with an exceptional ear like Patton masters easily. But this novel's demands are so much more arduous, requiring a narrator to plumb the depths of despair, hopelessness, faith, rage, and yearning that go on for page after page without letup." ( AudioFile)

Incredible narration to a spellbinding classic....

I have tried many times to make it through a Faulkner novel, only to become frustrated with my inablility to follow the complicated (albeit brilliant) style of his writing. He and Joyce are the two greats that I have not read to finality with any of their novels that I have attempted. Consequently, I was delighted to see that Audible was publishing this audio book with Will Patton as the narrator. Having listened to at least a dozen of his readings, light dawned instantly that this was the answer to my predicament. I was confident that, with his assistance, Faulker would no longer be a puzzle that I could not solve. He would provide the roadmap to get me through the Mississippi terrain.

I was not wrong in my expectations and I have not been disappointed in Mr. Patton or Mr. Faulkner. Each time I pull into my parking place at work, or into the driveway at night, I am disappointed that I must wait to continue with the story. But it is such a prize that I want to stetch out the experience for as long as possible.

While I was not alive during the era he writes of, I can remember my youth in the South twenty years later. The storyline and culture are eerily familiar. The strands of human nature still woven into today's headlines. Mr. Pattons's voice is a welcome friend and contains not a trace of falsity to the Southern tongue. The story line is relevent today both as history and commentary. It is all here......and I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Pure delight

It just doesn't get better than this. A masterpiece of Literature narrated with such depth of understanding and honesty that I think I'll go listen again right now. Will Patton brings it all out. And Faulkner is The Best of The Best. A very courageous writer.

Good story buried beneath the flowery prose

Faulkner is known for his lush descriptions and flowery prose. Light in August is filled with these staples, and it is a bit unfortunate, because there is a good story buried beneath these layers of fluff if you can only find it.

Also hindering the story is the plethora of chapter long soliloquies. Rambling and often incoherent, these passages read like fever dreams, and the reader is left without assistance to try to find some sense in them.

The story itself is filled with themes of racism, sexism, classism, authority, and religion. Two men named Joe, both from very different backgrounds, meet up while working at a mill. The elder Joe--quiet, mysterious, and dark, invites the younger Joe-- talkative, simple, and attention-seeking, to live with him in a cabin behind a rich woman's house so that they can sell bootleg whiskey.

One morning, the rich woman's kitchen catches fire and her body is found upstairs, leading the town to wonder if the men in the cabin had anything to do with her tragic demise.

A manhunt begins after one of the Joes claims the other killed the woman and demands the thousand dollar reward, and the other Joe disappears seemingly into thin air.

In the middle of the chaos, a young woman, heavily pregnant, shows up after walking to Mississippi on foot from Alabama in search of the baby's father. The town is scandalized by the unmarried woman with child, but a millworker falls in love with her and goes out of his way to help her with lodgings and food, all while trying to keep her from finding the father of the child.

The millworker takes daily council from a disgraced pastor who lives on the outskirts of town, and who tries to convince him to stay out of the woman's life completely, lest he fall into sin.

As the reader expects, the stories all intertwine eventually and the ensuing drama is satisfying and entertaining.

Four stars because of the need to sit through meaningless and unnecessary prose and confusing soliloquies to find the story. I'm not sure if I will read more by this author.

Will Patton does a great job with the southern accents, and makes the many characters distinguishable from one another. The narration is well-paced as well.

beautifully written, while also a tad ponderous

What did you like best about this story?

The charators and their stories are rich. The language gets a bit ponderous in multiple sections. It is easier to listen to when being active about listening rather then when attempting to multi-task.

Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?

I was moved to tears, especially by the individual plights of the women at the end of the story.

Not a fan

Where does Light in August rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

Not very highly. If I were to rank it with the limited experience I have had with readers, I would rate it at a "3" for "mediocre."

What was most disappointing about William Faulkner’s story?

As I am already not a Faulkner fan, the grating overly intense reader, while he accurately portrayed the accents and vocals, made the story nearly unbearable at parts to listen to. Listening to his voice for 16 hours was very difficult on my ears, even to the point of soreness.

A masterpiece brought to life...

This is a Masterpiece brought to life...perhaps the way it was in Faulkner's mind. Both knowing and unknowing, Patton's uncanny, yet genuine performance has brought Light in August to life in a way I had not previously experienced. Transfixing. Indomitable.

Illuminated writing, thoroughly depressing story

This is just such an incredibly depressing piece of work. Light in August gives us characters woven into a tale set in the American South in the 1930s. Whether it is intense racism, religious fervor or just the general depression of the time, there's just about nothing uplifting about this story. Forget uplifting, there's nothing even hopeful. You'll end this book in the knowledge that William Faulkner was a first-rate writer, and you'll be thanking the stars for not having been alive then and there.

A depressing story.

A depressing story about characters that made wrong choices & kept making them. Or characters that were victims & remained victims by making wrong choices. Faulkner’s style of writing is like stream of consciousness & about half the words in the story could have been chopped.

The "accessible" Faulkner: lovely, hard, and cruel

This is my first time reading the notoriously difficult Faulkner. I did not find Light in August to be particularly difficult, though it's also said to be his most accessible work. Faulker writes in a sort of sparse poetry that reminds me a little of Cormac McCarthy (though it's probably more appropriate to say that McCarthy reminds me of Faulkner). Faulkner is not as sparse, though; his prose requires a fair degree of sophistication to grasp and he weaves many, many themes through this novel, so I can see why he's considered a challenging read, especially in the era of YA ascendancy.

I was captivated by that prose very early. I was prepared to fall in love with Faulkner. The first act of the novel is compelling: the simple tale of a naive young woman named Lena Grove who leaves home in pursuit of the ne'er-do-well who done left her in an expectin' sorta way, possessing an almost childlike faith that it was all on account o' him not knowin' the situation and planning to send for her anyway once he's all settled, so once she catches up with him, the Lord will see to it that they is married like a couple with a baby comin' ought.

Yeah, right, and pigs will fly.

While the writing remained beautiful and poetic throughout the book, the third act, in which Faulkner wraps up all his themes, ties up all the loose ends, and brought it all home, dragged to the point that I thought he spent quite a few pages just indulging himself in the portentous importance of his own ponderous prose. It didn't diminish the genius of his writing, but it did wear on me, as someone who has developed a much greater appreciation for literary writing in the past few years, but still prizes storytelling as an essential ingredient in a great novel. The flashbacks and stream-of-consciousness chapters pile on, never becoming less finely written, but I started to see why Faulkner is considered "challenging"; the book starts out as a fine Southern tragedy, but dumps us deep in literary Faulkner-land by the end.

Also, this book is squirm-inducing in its beautiful and poetic rendering of the rankest misogyny and racism. The n-word abounds and yes, it's set in a time and place in which it would be unbelievable not to hear it flung about freely, but I found myself uncertain to the end just where Faulkner stood and what he was trying to say about his racially ambiguous anti-protagonist Christmas, who spends his life reflecting the world's contempt and abuse back at it. Joe Christmas grows up hard and mean and who can blame him? What I also found as horrific as it was authentic was the multi-layered hatred of all womankind, expressed through every single male character in one way or another, even the relatively sympathetic ones. Women in Light in August are the enemy even when they are self-sacrificing martyrs, oppressing men by the very act of martyrdom. I know it's fashionable to dismiss authorial intent, Death of the Author and all that, but man, methinks Faulkner had some issues with women. One of the most compelling passages in the book was the one explaining Christmas's solidarity with the unloving, hated adoptive father who beat him against his doormat of an adoptive mother who did nothing but try to comfort him. It was hard and true and ugly, and just left me awed at such prose that could fill me with such disquiet.


“She is like all the rest of them. Whether they are seventeen or fortyseven, when they finally come to surrender completely, it's going to be in words.”


This was really quite an experience. One has to have a taste for Faulkner, I think, and I suspect people will have wildly varying emotional reactions to him. I was drawn into Light in August enough that I will certainly read Faulkner again. 4 stars, because the prose is truly Nobel-caliber, but the story became abstruse and, for me, hard to love by the end.

A fine performance by Will Patton, whose accent is Southern enough to be authentic without being so thick as to hinder clarity.

Cinematic visit to the Old South

I read this book as a teenager and then again in college in my twenties and though I loved it I was clueless. Now with 58 years behind me, and having Faulkner's mysterious words read to me by the masterful actor Will Patton in that deep Southern accent, I have a much deeper understanding of this book. The sense of doom is palpable--the characters are blighted and suffering, once-glorious mansions have burned down, the noble ideals of the past are dead. I read somewhere that Faulkner believed Southerners lost their Edenic paradise because they chose to enslave another race of people. In this book everyone is suffering, not just the descendants of the white landowners defeated in the Civil War. The main character, Joe Christmas, hates himself and everyone else because he believes a rumor he heard that he has black blood. He celebrates this "taint" rather than try to pass as white, which he could easily do. He lives as a total outsider, always on the road, tying himself to no one and no place. He is haunted by the dark events of his past and chooses to bring about total chaos in the present. Faulkner's stream of consciousness style, his ear for dialogue, and his close observation of nature had me imagining I was watching a movie. The countryside and the people living around Jefferson, Mississippi, came alive. I plan to listen to Will Patton read more of Faulkner's great Southern saga.