All color and no substance. Picked up these sketches from earlier in Faulkner's career because I visited New Orleans and fell for the tourist trap that is the house he stayed in for a few months: the so-called "Faulkner House" which he neither owned nor occupied for longer than a year.

Like the house named for him, his sketches have only a superficial relationship to New Orleans. He is overly clever in his descriptions, and comes across contrived, like a 1920s William Gibson. Many of the stories seem to drive toward a point, a moral, or a distinct impression, but fail to deliver. It's a shame, because these sketches do have some raw material from which he could have made genuine charm.

His piece entitled "Sunset" is where he completely lost me. He writes a fictional back story to a news clipping about a black man who kills 3 men. Conceptually, I like it. However, Faulkner constructs a moronic negro cliche of a protagonist who's too dumb to know that "Af'ica" is another continent rather than a city down the road. It's a flat, numb characterization, and the narration uses the "N" word descriptively rather than in anger or in hatred, in damningly indifferent racism.

Faulkner wrote this even before his first novel, so as I read him more, I know his transformation from a heavy handed blockhead to a Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winning author will be the best story of all.