Set This House on Fire is set in Italy and centered on the themes of evil and redemption, as well as sex, death and growing up. The narrator, Leverett, is a lawyer from the South, but the story is primarily told through the recollections of its protagonist, a troubled artist named Cass.

It is a beautiful and excellently written novel with a rich and compelling use of language. It is one of William Styron’s finest books. The tale is intricately structured and quite enthralling.

It is the story of three Americans who converge in an Italian village shortly after World War II. One is a naive Southern lawyer. One is a rough-edged artist with a fatal penchant for alcohol. And one is a charming aristocrat who may be the closest thing possible to pure wickedness in an age that has banished the devil along with God. And one night, a woman is raped and eventually beaten to death. Also, a man is found dead at the bottom of a cliff.

Peter Leverett is a partial witness to these events and months later would like to know exactly what happened. And even though the case is written off as a murder followed by a suicide, Leverett does not believe the explanation. His search for the truth is complicated, and takes him through the Mediterranean and back to America.

Set This House on Fire is a powerful book, with strong and to some extent self-destructive personalities. It is a book of evil as well as power, rage and defeat, by an eminent writer.

Review

“This is not a book for the squeamish. For seldom in modern fiction have we had such a relentlessly powerful examination of human depravity.” — Chicago Daily News

Immediately impressive…the sense of the striking scene…the fine ear for dialogue, the sharp observation of cities and scenery and interiors.” — The New York Times Book Review

Links to books by William Styron at Amazon US, Amazon UK, and Amazon CAN.

©2010 William Styron. All Rights Reserved.

Sophie’s Choice is a grand novel – really world class fiction. It was first published in 1979, and is a complex, daunting and very ambitious novel. It is also a profoundly moving and disturbing novel. “Sophie’s Choice is a passionate, courageous book…a philosophical novel on the most important subject of the twentieth century,” said novelist and critic John Gardner in The New York Times Book Review:

“Sophie’s Choice is a thriller of the highest order, all the more thrilling for the fact that the dark, gloomy secrets we are unearthing one by one—sorting through lies and terrible misunderstandings like a hand groping for a golden nugget in a rattlesnake’s nest—may be authentic secrets of history and our own human nature.”

The main character in Sophie’s Choice is Stingo, a young southern man who has moved to New York City after the war. He struggles to become a writer. Along the way he meets Sophie, a beautiful Polish woman whose wrist bears the grim tattoo of a concentration camp, and her Jewish love, Nathan. Nathan is strange and unstable. Most of the time he seems normal, but he can also be wild and violent. Sophie is deeply in love with Nathan, and unable to detach herself even when he is cruel to her.

Stingo somehow connects with both of them. And more so to Sophie, who starts sharing details about her life with him. Even things she keeps secret from Nathan. Much of what she tells concerns the infamous death camp of Auschwitz and the evil things that took place there.

The stories Sophie tells are hard to read. They are the kind of stories that can make you cry. Her suffering was terrible, beyond imaginable in many ways, but even so there were others who were treated far worse.  Sophie’s story and her choices are extremely tough.

You should perhaps also be warned that there is some quite graphic sexuality in the novel. Whether it should be called pornography or not, is hard to say. The sex stories to some extent serve to keep the story bearable for the reader, as a book just about Sophie’s tale would be very hard to get through.

Styron’s writing style is very clever and original. He alternates between points of view and changes styles to tell the story in ways which reflect situations and emotions. Sophie’s Choice is beautiful yet heartbreaking, and at times it even manages to be funny – a true literary masterpiece, and in its way a strong tale of survival and the Holocaust as well.

Links to books by William Styron at Amazon US, Amazon UK,, and Amazon CAN.

©2010 William Styron. All Rights Reserved.

William Styron was 26 years old when he published this debut novel in 1951. It received a great deal of critical acclaim, and with a loud bang William Styron established himself on the literary scene. It is a debut novel that must be regarded as a masterpiece even today, one which stands up admirably to his later works. It is very impressive – a novel where a young man writes about deep psychological issues and demonstrates insight and reason at a level not at all expected at that age. As a writer, William Styron in my opinion compares favorably with Faulkner, Steinbeck, and Hemingway.

Among the honors bestowed on Lie Down in Darkness was the prestigious Rome Prize, awarded by the American Academy in Rome and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Lie Down in Darkness is a domestic drama. It is set in Tidewater, Virginia, in 1945. The technique employed by the young Styron is interesting, as the action in the book takes place in a single day – a somewhat tragic day, the funeral day of the young daughter of a Virginia family. Peyton Loftis, the beautiful eldest daughter of Helen and Milton Loftis, who had killed herself in New York. Styron uses flashbacks and lets the flashbacks lead up to that one day of her funeral. He pointedly and vividly provides memories that make it clear how and why the family broke apart. It is not a happy event he sets out to illuminate, nor is it a happy tale he writes.

The book is exceedingly well written and very engaging. It is also very well built up. It uses the third person perspective in very interesting and creative ways, and lets us see events from the viewpoint of a number of the people involved. Here Styron is very smart – while the book is about Peyton, for a long time we don’t get to meet her, only hear about her. To some extent he starves us – makes us really want to get her perspective. And then when he lets her loose, it’s a revelation.

Lie Down in Darkness is a book that slowly grows on you, and I had a very hard time putting it down at all for the last 100-150 pages or so. Even here, in his debut, Styron is subtle in his portrayals and writes with considerable craftsmanship and a prose which is at times almost spellbinding. A story where tragedy is followed by tragedy. A sad, yet compelling tale of disappointed love and lives heading blindly towards destruction – not wanting to see where the road was leading them.

Links to books by William Styron at Amazon US, Amazon UK,, and Amazon CAN.

©2010 William Styron. All Rights Reserved.

©2010 William Styron. All Rights Reserved.

©2010 William Styron. All Rights Reserved.

A new legal battle is brewing. This time between publishers and copyright owners over the right to digital versions, or e-book versions, of published titles. Facing declining book sales, both the family of William Styron and his publishers want to produce e-book versions of titles like “Sophie’s Choice,” “The Confessions of Nat Turner” and Mr. Styron’s memoir of depression, “Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness,” New York Times writes.

According to New York Times:

Mr. Styron’s family believes it retains the rights, since the books were first published before e-books existed. Random House, Mr. Styron’s longtime publisher, says it owns those rights, and it is determined to secure its place — and continuing profits — in the Kindle era.

To be sure, this question applies to a large number of books, some of them very valuable commercially. The digital fate of e-book versions of most so-called back-list books seems to be open to dispute, concerning books, for instance, by Joseph Heller, Ralph Ellison, John Updike and others.

E-books, with no printing costs and cheap digital distribution, represent an increasingly attractive and potientially profitable publishing channel. And, of course, the only one that is growing for the moment.

More and more readers seem to buy e-book readers. Kindle, by Amazon, is a huge hit. And now Barnes & Noble has released its own e-book reader, the Nook. The third major contender among consumers is Sony’s e-book reader, the PRS-600BC and PRS-700BC.

New York Times has published a comprehensive review of e-book readers, but these for the moment seem to be the major competitors.

Nook is the device on the top, and below are pictures of Kindle and the Sony reader.

It’s hard to say which is the best. They all seem to be very good. Their prices are fairly similar too. I suspect that to a large extent it is a question about what your shopping and reading habits are and which company you have the strongest relationship to.

It will be interesting to follow what is happening in this area in the near future. Readers are faced with several good choices, and with more to come. Publishers and copyright holders, on the other hand, seem to be destined for huge battles in court until the merits of copyrights and publishing rights can be clearly established.

Links to the e-readers: Barnes & Noble’s Nook, Amazon’s Kindle, and Sony’s e-book readers.

©2010 William Styron. All Rights Reserved.

• Lie Down in Darkness, 1951
• The Long March, 1952 (serial), 1956 (book)
• Set This House on Fire, 1960
• The Confessions of Nat Turner, 1967
• Sophie’s Choice, 1979
• This Quiet Dust, and Other Writings, 1982, expanded 1993
• The Cunning of History, by Richard L. Rubenstein and William Styron
• Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness, 1990
• A Tidewater Morning: Three Tales from Youth, 1993
• Dog Eat Dog: A Novel, by Edward Bunker and William Styron
• Conversations With William Styron, by William Styron
• Havanas in Camelot, 2008
• The Suicide Run Five Tales of the Marine Corps ( 2009)
• Letters to My Father

Links to books by William Styron at Amazon US, Amazon UK, and Amazon CAN.

©2010 William Styron. All Rights Reserved.