William Faulkner’s deeply poetic and idiomatic prose style brings to life characters that feel as substantial as people you’ve known and loved. Ta-Nehisi Coates, in an insightful piece written for The Atlantic, argues that “Faulkner does not so much give a faithful rendition of the South, as he takes the language, the diction and vocab of his region, twists, contorts, pulls, and stretches it in a kind of homage.

“I was thirteen years old when I saw the kung-fu film The Thirty-sixth Chamber of Shaolin, the story of a man who trains to be a Shaolin monk then leaves the temple to teach the world their style of kung-fu. Nine years later, I formed the Wu-Tang Clan--and we left Staten Island to teach the world our style of hip-hop.”

– RZA, The Tao of Wu

Father’s Day is here, and it’s time for a roundup of films and novels that epitomize the complexity of fatherhood. These fictional fathers run the gamut: from hardworking men in post-World War II Italy, to animated clownfish struggling with the demands of being a single parent.

Films

“He was not of an age, but for all time.” – Ben Jonson