Russell Banks, Author . HarperCollins $25.95 (400p) ISBN 978-0-06-019735-3
Six years after the publication of his much-lauded novel Cloudsplitter
, Banks returns with a portrayal of personal and political turmoil in West Africa and the U.S. The darling of the title is narrator Hannah Musgrave, a privileged child of the...
READ FULL REVIEW
Russell Banks, Author . Harper $24.95 (287p) ISBN 978-0-06-143025-1
Signature
Reviewed by
Scott Turow
Like Banks’s two most recent novels—Cloudsplitter
, a 1998 book about the abolitionist John Brown, and The Darling
, about the wages of ’60s radicalism—The Reserve
looks backward, this...
READ FULL REVIEW
Russell Banks, Author . Seven Stories $21.95 (127p) ISBN 978-1-58322838-8
Two years ago, novelist Banks was interviewed by French television for a documentary about American history. His testimony so impressed Banks's French publisher that he made a book out of his remarks, translated into French, co-released with...
READ FULL REVIEW
Russell Banks, Author HarperCollins $27.5 (528p) ISBN 978-0-06-017396-8
Two-thirds of the 32 stories in this magnificent collection have appeared before, in the four volumes of short fiction Banks has published over the past 25 years; all, including nine new ones, were chosen by the author as representative of work that
READ FULL REVIEW
Russell Banks, Author Sun and Moon Press $13.95 (0p) ISBN 978-1-55713-004-4
With this revised version of a 1975 novella, acclaimed novelist Banks (Continental Drift) lampoons the American family in a wonderfully funny range of literary styles. Family Life opens in the macho mode of the tall tale cum horse opera, replete...
READ FULL REVIEW
Russell Banks, Author HarperCollins Publishers $18.95 (355p) ISBN 978-0-06-016142-2
In this masterful novel Banks ( Continental Drift ) returns to the decaying region of Catamount, N.H. Harrowed by snow and bone-freezing cold for the several days of the novel's duration, Lawford is an old mill town, the home of protagonist Wade...
READ FULL REVIEW
Russell Banks, Author Little Brown and Company $20 (257p) ISBN 978-0-06-016703-5
With resonating effect, Banks ( Continental Drift ; Affliction ) tackles the provocative subject of a fatal accident involving children, and its effect on a small community. On a frigid, snowy morning in the Adirondacks, veteran school bus driver...
READ FULL REVIEW
Russell Banks, Author HarperCollins Publishers $22 (390p) ISBN 978-0-06-017275-6
A change in setting halfway through this ambitious novel by the respected author of Continental Drift and Affliction diminishes its effectiveness to a certain degree. The first half, a starkly realistic, powerful portrait of a troubled adolescent...
READ FULL REVIEW
Russell Banks. Ecco, $25.95 (240p) ISBN 978-0-06-185765-2
While well-known for his impressive novelistic output, Banks (Continental Drift) is also a prolific short story writer. This collection, his sixth, is made up of four never-before-published stories. The first, “Former Marine,” sets the exhausted,...
READ FULL REVIEW
Russell Banks. Ecco, $25.99 (288p) ISBN 978-0-06-185767-6
Although billed as “travel writings,” the 10 introspective essays collected in this volume explore their author’s emotional geography as much as the far-flung lands he visits. In the lengthy title piece, which recounts “a winter-long, island-hopping
READ FULL REVIEW
Russell Banks, Author, Arturo Patten, Joint Author Harper Perennial $13.99 (368p) ISBN 978-0-06-092007-4
Divorced, inept, confused and stubborn Wade Whitehouse, harrowed by snow and bone-freezing cold for the several days of the novel's duration, is afflicted with a nostalgic, romantic streak. Wade's dream of marrying Margie, a goodhearted waitress,...
READ FULL REVIEW
Russell Banks, Author, Arturo Patten, Joint Author Harper Perennial $13.99 (272p) ISBN 978-0-06-092324-2
Banks employs a series of narrators to present a powerful account of an Adirondack community riven by a bus accident that claims 14 children. A Literary Guild alternate in cloth. (Aug.)
READ FULL REVIEW
Russell Banks, Author, Tom Stechschulte, Read by HarperAudio $39.95 (0p) ISBN 978-0-06-145751-7
Tom Stechschulte's voice is well suited to this novel's myriad layers of time and interlocking characters. Although superficially different-genteel versus rebellious, calm versus wild-the central figures all have an old-fashioned depth. Set in the...
READ FULL REVIEW
Russell Banks, Author, H. S. James, Editor Ballantine Books $5.99 (0p) ISBN 978-0-345-33021-5
On the extravagant, shallow promises of his brother, Bob Dubois, 30, a burnt-out New Hampshire oil burner repairman, takes his family to Florida. There the Duboises meet their destiny in the form of a counterpoint familythat of Vanise Dorsinville, a
READ FULL REVIEW
Russell Banks. Ecco, $28.99 (320p) ISBN 978-0-06-303675-8
In this sinuous if uneven novel, Banks (Lost Memory of Skin) depicts the protean character of a filmmaker who turns the camera on himself at the end of a storied career. In the last stages of an incurable cancer, Canadian documentarian Leonard Fife...
READ FULL REVIEW
Russell Banks. Knopf, $28 (224p) ISBN 978-0-593-53677-3
Banks’s elegant tryptic of novellas, arriving a year after his death at 82, evoke a hardscrabble Upstate New York setting reminiscent of his novels The Sweet Hereafter and Rule of the Bone. Each story touches on themes of community, family, and...
READ FULL REVIEW
ARTICLES
