As I Lay Dying

William Faulkner’s experimental novel follows the Bundren family as they haul their mother Addie’s coffin across flooded, ruined Mississippi country to bury her in her hometown. Told in fifteen shifting inner voices, including Addie’s own, the book turns a simple errand into a dark, sometimes comic ordeal that exposes each family member’s private motives. It is one of the landmarks of modernist American fiction.