The Collected Stories of William Faulkner

Multiple reviewers reach for the same word to describe all forty-two stories: wildly uneven. The Wilderness section, especially Red Leaves, gets flagged by readers and critics alike as the “least interesting group of the lot,” and one reader admits “I stopped reading at page 343,” right in the middle of it. Elly draws sharper fire still: one reviewer calls it “'Elly' is melodramatic dreck. Howlingly bad.” Some readers question whether the stories even hold up against the novels, asking whether they are “not quite up to the standard.” Dated racial language and period dialect add a real barrier at nine hundred pages, and several reviewers recommend a shorter best-of instead of the full collection.