William Faulkner

Where should I start with him?

the Greeks

Light in August

Either Soldier's Pay or As I Lay Dying.

Sound and the Fury is his best work. Not an easy read though. You might read the appendix that Faulkner attached in the later editions and then jump into the novel.

sartori

All these are wrong answers. The Bear is his only very good work. His other hunting stories are also good. The rest is really awful.

Light in August, lad

the sound and the fury or light in august is recommended to start

no where he's american

you shouldn't start with him. he was a racist pig.

i generally start with the library of america's collection in sequence—for phil. k. dick, it was "man in the high castle."

for faulkner, it was "as i lay dying."

Boni & Liveright
Mosquitoes
Sartoris
The Sound and the Fury
As I Lay Dying
Sanctuary
Light in August
Pylon
Absalom, Absalom!
The Unvanquished
The Wild Palms
The Hamlet
Go Down, Moses
Intruder in the Dust
Requiem for a Nun
The Town
The Mansion
The Reivers

The Sound & The Fury and As I Lay Dying are his two books that are required reading to not be a philistine, so probably one of those I guess. Absalom, Absalom! and Light In August are both very good as well. That's all I've read by him though.

While this is a good list, it's fake. Please stop trying to make it a meme.

As were all good writers

He was raised by a black woman and was staunchly against racism.

/You/ should read The Hamlet, and Pylon.

Holy shit. You have to be trolling.

Reading TSatF first is a mistake. Not a major one, but it's his most difficult, experimental and personal work of his.

There is a clever and very subtle bit of proof of this in TSatF. Notice how Benjy sees Dilsey and Vardaman's voices aren't much different than anyone else, but the other perspectives see the negroes' voices as very broken and cartoonish. Benjy, being retarded, could not see color/race, therefore could not percieve the differences in language.

...

The Sound and the Fury was my first; I'm reading Absalom, Absalom! now. The opening of TSatF is extremely difficult, barely comprehensible even, but I found that if you just push on through it without skipping ahead or turning to a plot summary, you soon get halfway through the novel and by then the plot and characters and setting have resolved themselves in your mind and the novel is simple reading afterward. But the real reward comes when you read it again: now you understand all the plot and characters, you can deduce what events Faulkner refers to from a single particular word, and so when you read the incomprehensible first chapter everything that didn't make sense before comes to light; you realise that the story is not really in the words but the context and implied happenings they point towards, and the chapter becomes a series of epiphanies linking passages to implied events. Faulkner takes an entire chapter to tell his story not by explicating but by concealing. That was for me where the magic of the novel was, and it's definitely worth the grind through the first reading of the novel, even if you haven't read any Faulkner before, to get at it.