The Wild Palms (Vintage International)

by William Faulkner

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Book cover for The Wild Palms

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In this feverishly beautiful novel—originally titled If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem—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 with 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.
  • ISBN10 0679741933
  • ISBN13 9780679741930
  • Publish Date 31 October 1995
  • Publish Status Active
  • Publish Country US
  • Publisher Random House USA Inc
  • Imprint Vintage Books