Product Review

William Faulkner's fictional chronicle of Yoknapatawpha County culminates in his three last novels, rich with the history and lore of the domain where he set most of his novels and stories. "The Town" (1957), the second novel of the Snopes trilogy that began with "The Hamlet," charts the rise of the rapacious Flem Snopes and his extravagantly extended family as they connive their way into power. In "The Mansion" (1959), the trilogy's conclusion, a wronged relative finally destroys Flem and his dynasty. Faulkner's last novel, "The Reivers: A Reminiscence" (1962), distinctly mellower and more elegiac than his earlier work, is a picaresque adventure that evokes the world of childhood with a final burst of comic energy. "Novels 1957-1962," like previous volumes in The Library of America's edition of the complete novels of William Faulkner, has been newly edited by textual scholar Noel Polk to establish an authoritative text, that features a chronology and notes by Fau! lkner's biographer Joseph Blotner.