Mosquitoes

In the sweltering summer of 1927, a collection of self-important artists and their wealthy patrons board a yacht for a cruise down the Mississippi. Faulkner skewers the Jazz Age's artistic pretensions through a cast of painters, poets, and sculptors who mistake emptiness for profundity. The mosquitoes that torment them are more honest than their human counterparts, feeding on genuine blood while the characters drain each other of meaning through endless posturing. As the yacht drifts through humid waters, Faulkner's sharp wit exposes the fundamental fraudulence beneath the surface of artistic ambition and cultural sophistication. It is a gleeful, acid-tongued comedy that shows Faulkner could laugh before he learned to mourn, revealing a side of the Nobel laureate that even his most devoted readers rarely encounter.