Mosquitoes

A satirical romp on a yacht full of artists, poets, and pretenders. The novel Faulkner wrote before he became Faulkner.

William Faulkner’s second novel is a witty, sharp-tongued comedy of manners—a sharp departure from the tragic intensity of his later masterpieces, and a fascinating glimpse of the young writer finding his voice.

A four-day cruise on a yacht in Lake Pontchartrain, Louisiana. The guests include a wealthy patroness of the arts, a poet who cannot finish his epic, a sculptor who talks endlessly about art, a sensitive young woman, a cynical male narrator, and a whole swarm of mosquitoes. They drink. They flirt. They argue about aesthetics, sex, and the meaning of life. Nothing much happens. That is the point. Faulkner skewers the pretensions of the New Orleans art world he had recently left, mocking the self-importance of artists who talk more than they create. The novel ends with the yacht returning to port, nothing resolved, and the mosquitoes still biting.

This is Faulkner at his most light and playful: a novel about the gap between talking about art and making it, about the foolishness of youth, and about the mosquitoes that remind us that we are never as important as we think. Mosquitoes is the forgotten Faulkner—and for fans of his later work, it is a delight.

• Faulkner’s second novel, published in 1927, following Soldiers’ Pay (1926)

• Set in New Orleans, where Faulkner lived and wrote in the mid-1920s

• A roman à clef, with characters based on real New Orleans artists, including Faulkner himself

Available in multiple formats:

• Paperback & Hardcover: Beautifully designed print editions presenting the complete, unabridged text made to last.

• Ebook: DRM-free EPUB compatible with Kindle, Kobo, Apple Books, and all major e-readers.

• Audiobook: Professionally narrated, complete and unabridged, available on all major audiobook platforms.

A beautifully crafted edition for your shelf, your device, or your ears—or the perfect gift for anyone who knows that every great writer started somewhere, and sometimes that somewhere is a yacht full of pretentious poets.

About the Author

William Faulkner (1897–1962) was an American novelist and short story writer, widely regarded as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. Born in New Albany, Mississippi, he spent most of his life in Oxford, Mississippi, the model for his fictional Yoknapatawpha County. Mosquitoes was his second novel, written after Soldiers’ Pay (1926) and before Sartoris (1929), the novel that introduced Yoknapatawpha County. Faulkner lived in New Orleans from 1924 to 1926, where he wrote for the Times-Picayune and was part of a circle of artists that included Sherwood Anderson, who encouraged him to write about Mississippi. Mosquitoes is Faulkner’s only novel set entirely outside the South (Louisiana is Southern, but not Mississippi), and his only comic novel. He later dismissed it as “trivial,” but it remains a fascinating document of his early development. His other major works include The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August(1932), and Absalom, Absalom! (1936). He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949 and the Pulitzer Prize twice. He died of a heart attack in 1962.