I remember my roommate reading Max Frisch's I'm Not Stiller in college, and when I asked him what it was about, all I can recall is his pretentious tone and the stench of tuna on his breath. Well, since I'm teaching this philosophy in lit class next year, I thought I'd try the great Swiss existential novel, and let the oxymorons fall where they may. Like Kundera in his marriage of romance and deep thoughts, Frisch delivers more effectively for me on questions of identity and the quest for meaning than he does in some of the longer sections on the tumultuous relationships of two middle-aged Euro couples. But he nails the pettiness of emotion and irrationality of cruelty between two people, especially from threatened men. I'd recommend this one with reservations and throw in the nearly irrelevant fun fact that a short stretch of one narrative takes place in the fine city of Oakland, Ca.

Tom Franklin knocked Poachers and Hell at the Breach out of the proverbial writer's park, and I could not wait for the new one, Smonk. Sadly, he goes the vulgar comic route, and once you've seen possums crawling out of one set of rotting diseased intestines, you've seen 'em all. For sixty pages I was marveling at his wide array of describing a rising penis or delivering the act of love, but after awhile the slit throats and the anal vapors and the fifteen year old hooker rubbing out handies blur together into one long dirty joke. Maybe that's a tad unfair, but his first two works were scary and powerful and evocative. Maybe this was his attempt, like Dexter in Deadwood, to show off his hee haw. Didn't work for me, but maybe you dig a slimy possum. No accounting for viscous tastes.

Jay Parini's 2005 Faulkner biography is a tightly packed workmanlike effort that at 438 pages reads like a delightfully refreshing Reader's Digest version of the great man's life, and I mean that with the utmost respect. One chapter sets the personal and historical backdrop for the writing, and the next delivers the analysis and critical response to each work. You get the heroic and pathetic drinking stories, the relentless anxiety over money and the whoring in Hollywood, the young girls he just couldn't quit, and a critic who isn't afraid to rank his subject's work (no surprises, though, with the Big 4 followed by Go Down, Moses and The Hamlet and The Bear close behind). All you can do is marvel at the man's endurance, persistence and glorious production in the face of so many obstacles: critical hostility, financial shortfalls, drunk and spendthrift wife, horrific drinking binges, etc. Biography does not remove the mystery or divert your attention from the work- it raises your appreciation higher, and at the risk of matching fish breath's pomposity, it raises us all to see what a man can do when the right spirits align inside his head.