Sanctuary

Sanctuary was a rare bestseller among Faulkner's works: within three weeks of its 1931 publication it sold as many copies as The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying combined, and it was twice adapted for the screen by Hollywood. It is also Faulkner's most controversial and most self-contradictory book: he said he wrote it only for money, yet revised it again and again with great effort; once dismissed as a sensational potboiler, it was rediscovered by critics half a century later and hailed as the sharpest blade of his social criticism. The story uses the framework of detective fiction to contain the core of Greek tragedy; crime, lynching, courtroom and perjury drive it forward layer by layer, pulling readers along through suspense, and when they close the book they face the corruption and moral imbalance of the entire Southern society. Tao Jie's translation is steady and precise, preserving the original's cold, hard, jump-cut narrative rhythm; it is well read alongside The Sound and the Fury and Light in August in the Faulkner series, to appreciate how this Nobel laureate turned his "postage-stamp" homeland into an allegory of an entire era.