As I Lay Dying

By: William Faulkner, Jesmyn Ward - introduction

Narrated by: Marc Cashman, Robertson Dean, Lina Patel, Lorna Raver, Jesmyn Ward

A true 20th-century classic from the Nobel Prize-winning author of The Sound and the Fury: the famed harrowing account of the Bundren family’s odyssey across the Mississippi countryside to bury Addie, their wife and mother.

As I Lay Dying is one of the most influential novels in American fiction in structure, style, and drama. Narrated in turn by each of the family members, including Addie herself as well as others, the novel ranges in mood from dark comedy to the deepest pathos.

“I set out deliberately to write a tour-de-force. Before I ever put pen to paper and set down the first word I knew what the last word would be and almost where the last period would fall.” —William Faulkner on As I Lay Dying

This edition reproduces the corrected text of As I Lay Dying as established in 1985 by Noel Polk.

Cover photograph: © Eggleston Artistic Trust. Courtesy Eggleston Artistic Trust and David Zwirner.

Critic reviews

"For range of effect, philosophical weight, originality of style, variety of characterization, humor, and tragic intensity, [Faulkner's works] are without equal in our time and country."
--Robert Penn Warren

You Have to "Get" Faulkner

Faulkner is not an easy read. Expect to go back often and really listen to the story. Expect to look up some notes and commentary to grasp what the hell is going on. Expect to struggle with lines like, "My mother is a fish"

Expect to WORK through this book.

And expect the best of literature and performance. Expect to learn. Expect to expand your insight into frustration and futility. Expect to feel pain.

This is a great piece of literature and it's very well delivered.

Worth the effort.

Excelent performance, amazing direction

This is my first audio book from a classic author I listen to. I have mixed feelings about my experience. On the one hand, I went through a work of literature that I wanted to read for a long time.. But with the way information abounds now a days, I doubt that I could have ever read the novel entirely in book form. That makes me happy. On top of that, the performance, adaptation and direction were quite excellent. I mean, really, really enjoyable and as close as what the author might have had in his mind as you can guess. The voices of the performers were well selected and the actors did a wonderful job. I wish that, in the past, I had experienced more books like this. I "reckon" that my imagination would not have given me the richness and variety of voices and accents that this audio work provides.
On the down side, listening to the book, you miss the opportunity to go back to the passages of pure poetry or some kind of feat in language that the author may have written and you could miss it just listening to the audio. What is poetry to the director or the actor may not be so to you and vice versa. I mean it is hard to describe, but I am veteran reader of classic literature and I just know that by not reading the page, I missed the elegant delivery of William Faulkner some how. It is just something about the page on a book that you can mark and comment, and go back even years later that the audio version would not facilitate.
Still I am really happy that I listened to this work, I get it, why they offer a kindle version of the printed book along with the audio; it makes sense. But money wise, it is just more expensive. Besides, my purpose of becoming an audible member was to make better use of my commute time.
I look forward to enjoy other works of this kind of literature here in audible.

Made the narrative and story clearer

with different voice actors it became more clear what people are saying and how they were behaving. Being an audible book help me out a lot with this book while when I read it myself I get struck. Seriously, how is Jewel's mother a horse?!

Faulkner in authentic voices

As disjointed as Faulkner's writing can be, the spot-on authentic voicing of this performance helps make it better comprehensible to the listener. Great performance of a great story

Faulkner's As I Lay Dying review

As a Faulknerian scholar, I was pleasantly surprised by this audio rendition of one of Faulkner's complex works. I used this recording to assist a blind peer who was studying the novel, and I read my copy along with the recorded reading to help establish and clarify the characters' points of view, especially with regards to the sections involving stream of consciousness.

Together, we found the use of multiple readers helped distinguish the different narrators of this work. We thoroughly approved of the readers' Southern accents and (being from the South)found very few flaws in that regard. A few artistic interpretations of the stream of consciousness sections were distracting, as the readers chose to add punctuation rather than flow rapidly from one thought to the next without breaks. This did not take away from the story as a whole, but I did need to clarify this for the academic purposes of my peer.

All in all, this was an excellent rendition of Faulkner's novel. I am pleased to have this recording in my permanent library.