Bleak Expectations - Mark Evans (a BBC series/skits on Dickens' works)

"Mistress of the White House: The Story of Dolly Madison" - Helen L. Morgan

MESSIE BESSIE OF KRUMPETVILLE by Janet Krumpet ( I did order a copy to casually display on my coffee table for some in my family to take the hint !!! )

How to describe why Faulkner knocks me out. First of all, he's depicted the angst and deeply complex race relations of the deep rural south in a way that I don't think anyone else has, though of course what he writes about lies now in the past. Second, his style, though it seems impenetrable at first, strikes me as something like the way people think-- one thought brings you to another then to another then to another--there's a whole world there. And once you get him, you find that there is great humor in some of his work and characters. I was in high school when I first started to read Faulkner, and began with The Sound and the Fury. It took me several tries--and I finally bought a reader's guide to Faulkner which helped a great deal, especially realizing that there were two characters named Quentin, one a young girl and the other a much older man. I've always thought that Faulkner was THE great American novelist because he captured his piece of America and its inhabitants better than any other writer has captured his chosen place and time. The novella The Bear is probably the best story about hunting ever written, and the last part of it, often omitted, contains, according to Malcolm Cowley (the editor of my collection) "the longest sentence in American fiction, and longer than any in English or Irish fiction, except for Molly Bloom's soliloquy. This very complex and difficult to disentangle sentence contains "one of Faulkner's most impressive themes: the belief in [the character's] heart that the land itself had been cursed by slavery, and that the only way for him to escape the curse was to relinquish the land."