A light skim of his biography on Wikipedia clarified some things: Sound and the Fury appears to have been a major stylistic breakthrough. I got curious and started the Collected Short Stories and feeling a little mixed. He's a little fast and loose with the slurs which is really grating! I was especially surprised to see Ralph Ellison's endorsement of him mentioned on the Wikipedia article. Yeesh!
"Barn Burning" is the first story in the collection, and I heard Haruki Murakami's eponymous story on the Fiction Podcast. Now I'm bristling a little that Murakami might be making the reference because the two stories are thematically very different. I liked Murakami's when I heard it, but after reading 1Q84 he's on real thin ice with me.