Russel Banks' fourteen-year-old Bone is a latter day Holden Caulfield—aware of the phoniness and empty, sordid posturing of adults—and he's also a Huck Finn, lighting out from the strictures of conventional society. Bone tells his story in an unselfconscious manner, a naive narrator telling the ...
It’s not memory you need for telling this story, writes Russel Banks in the italicized introduction with which he begins Continental Drift: With a story like this, you want an accounting to occur, not a recounting, and a presentation, not a representation, which is why it’s told the way it’s told...
This might be a spoilerish review, better read after the book. As we meet Hannah Musgrave, she's an organic farmer in her fifties; a woman haunted by a past that she is finally willing to confront. In a first-person, confessional tone, Musgrave brings the reader along as she returns to Africa; re...
This book is a collection of 13 short stories about the residents of the Granite State trailerpark. The setting is in a small town in New England in 1980's. The trailerpark is home to various eccentric residents whose vastly different lives are told are told in each short story. 11 of these stori...
This story appears to have multiple levels; the author has created a narrator who speaks about events he wasn’t always witness to. The question is whether this particular screen is one that was employed to help the author establish discrepancies and doubt and incertitude or whether it was employe...
Hamilton Stark is a New Hampshire pipe fitter and the sole inhabitant of the house from which he evicted his own mother. He is the villain of five marriages and the father of a daughter so obsessed that she had been writing a book about him for years. Hamilton Stark is a boor, a misanthrope, a ha...
A remarkable and remarkably simple piece of literature that spawned a remarkable movie.Russell Banks, Russell Banks, Russell Banks. If I write his name enough it might conjure a complete sentence from my mind, as though his name alone might rub some of his magic off on me and I could explain this...
How this book ranks as a New York Times Book Review "Editors' Choice" is beyond me. At 758 pages, it's about 600 pages too long, making me think Banks must have some sort of auteur cred with his publisher that allows him to demand no editor lay hands on his oeuvre. This is fiction, so I realize i...
Will be shipped from US. Brand new copy.
I owe Algren a review. He's definitely skilled, and attuned to the bittersweet, to the chasm that occurs between feelings and behavior, especially when it comes to romance or dalliance, and perhaps especially with the down-and-out and poor. The sympathy comes across, but it feels not as if it's...
Russell Banks is turning down the heat. His most recent novels -- released to wide critical and popular acclaim -- were fiery tales of revolution: Cloudsplitter (1998) told the explosive story of abolition terrorist John Brown, and The Darling (2004) raced us through the sprawling horrors of Libe...
I had left my young wife’s kitchen and had arrived at my workshop at the side of the house and before the road, where, as had been my procedure since completing the apprenticeship of my youth and embarking singly upon the practice of this my calling, I had commenced to lay out the day’s labor and...
Perhaps especially a man in his mid-seventies from northern New England who has longed since boyhood for escape, for rejuvenation, for wealth untold, for erotic and narcotic and sybaritic fresh starts, for high romance, mystery, and intrigue, and who so often has turned those longings toward the ...
But he wasn’t asleep, he tells himself. Merely resting, eyes closed. Listening. Just as, when Rose was still in high school, he lay in bed after midnight and listened for the sound of a car—his, or the current boyfriend’s, her girlfriend’s father’s car, sometimes even his ex-wife’s car—bringing R...
Actually Billy walks into a neighborhood grocery store, not a bar, and he’s only pretending he has a parrot on his shoulder. He’s trying to think of a new version of an old joke. When Billy’s depressed or scared—and this morning he’s both—he has imaginary conversations with himself. The place is ...
The day before the arrival of the storm they will have secured their homes as best they could by clearing their terraces and patios of outdoor furniture and toys, and those who have them will have double-tied their boats to pilings or put them in dry-dock storage, brought their satellite dishes i...