This issue introduces the first of several new initiatives that we will establish during our tenure as associate editors: The JAS Bookshelf. We will be inviting contributors to reflect upon a single written work – fiction, scholarship, or otherwise – that has been indispensable in shaping their research, their teaching and their outlook beyond academia. Our aim in developing this strand is to curate a “living,” eclectic, and diverse Bookshelf on our website from these various contributions that will grow over time and will be sustained during subsequent associate editorships. To propose a topic for a Bookshelf entry or cluster, please contact the associate editors: [email protected].

Our first Bookshelf cluster looks at the life and work of Nobel laureate, William Faulkner. Ahmed Honeini's entry focuses on his first encounter with The Sound and the Fury (1929) and the ways in which his engagements with Faulkner have guided his navigation of early career academia. This is followed by two contributions, from Carl Rollyson and Bernard T. Joy, on the artistic and intellectual innovations of Faulkner's labyrinthine modernist monument Absalom, Absalom! (1936).