Trailerpark

Get to know the colorful cast of characters at the granite state trailerpark, where flora in number 11 keeps more than a hundred guinea pigs andscreams at people to stay away from her babies, Claudel in number 5 thinks he is lucky until his wife burns down their trailer and runs off with Howie Leeke, and Noni in number 7 has telephone conversations with Jesus and tells the police about them.

. In this series of related short stories, realistic portrayals of individual Americans and paints a portrait of New England life that is at once dark, witty, Russell Banks offers gripping, and revealing.


Rule of the Bone: A Novel

It is an amazing journey of self-discovery through a world of magic, violence, betrayal and redemption. When we first meet him, chappie is a punked-out teenager living with his mother and abusive stepfather in an upstate New York trailer park. He finally settles in an abandoned schoolbus with Rose, a child he rescues from a fast-talking pedophile.

. Rejected by his parents, he claims for himself a new identity as a permanent outsider; he gets a crossed-bones tattoo on his arm, out of school and in trouble with the police, and takes the name "Bone. He finds dangerous refuge with a group of biker-thieves, and then hides in the boarded-up summer house of a professor and his wife.

During this time, he slips into drugs and petty crime. There bone meets i-man, an exiled rastafarian, and together they begin a second adventure that takes the reader from Middle America to the ganja-growing mountains of Jamaica.


The Sweet Hereafter: A Novel

In the sweet hereafter, Russell Banks tells a story that begins with a school bus accident. Using four different narrators, banks creates a small-town morality play that addresses one of life's most agonizing questions: when the worst thing happens, who do you blame? .


Continental Drift P.S.

Now available for the first time in e-book format, and a gripping, a powerful literary classic from one of contemporary fiction's most acclaimed and important writers, Russell Banks's Continental Drift is a masterful novel of hope lost and gained, disappointment, indelible story of fragile lives uprooted and transformed by injustice, and the seductions and realities of the American dream.

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Affliction

A well-digger and policeman in a bleak New Hampshire town, he is a former high-school star gone to beer fat, a loner with a mean streak. It is a mark of russell banks' artistry and understanding that Wade comes to loom in one's mind as a blue-collar American Everyman afflicted by the dark secret of the macho tradition.

Wade whitehouse is an improbable protagonist for a tragedy. Told by his articulate, equally scarred younger brother, Wade's story becomes as spellbinding and inexorable as a fuse burning its way to the dynamite.


Cloudsplitter: A Novel

A triumph of the imagination and a masterpiece of modern storytelling, Cloudsplitter is narrated by the enigmatic Owen Brown, last surviving son of America's most famous and still controversial political terrorist and martyr, John Brown. Deeply researched, cloudsplitter is dazzling in its re-creation of the political and social landscape of our history during the years before the Civil War, brilliantly plotted, and peopled with a cast of unforgettable characters both historical and wholly invented, when slavery was tearing the country apart.

But within this broader scope, heartbreaking narrative filled with intimate scenes of domestic life, suspenseful, of violence and action in battle, Russell Banks has given us a riveting, of romance and familial life and death that make the reader feel in astonishing ways what it is like to be alive in that time.

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A Permanent Member of the Family

A former marine” asks, to chilling effect, if one can ever stop being a parent. And in the haunting, evocative “Veronica, ” a mysterious woman searching for her daughter may not be who she claims she is. Moving between the stark beauty of winter in upstate New York and the seductive heat of Florida, Banks’s acute and penetrating collection demonstrates the range and virtuosity of both his narrative prowess and his startlingly panoramic vision of modern American life.

Suffused with russell banks’s trademark lyricism and reckless humor, the twelve stories in A Permanent Member of the Family examine the myriad ways we try—and sometimes fail—to connect with one another, as we seek a home in the world. In the title story, a father looks back on the legend of the cherished family dog whose divided loyalties mirrored the fragmenting of his marriage.

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The Angel on the Roof: The Stories of Russell Banks

As is characteristic of all of bank's works, these stories resonate with irony and compassion, honesty and insight, extending into the vast territory of the heart and the world, from working-class New England to Florida and the Caribbean and Africa. Broad in scope and rich in imagination, The Angel on the Roof affirms Russell Banks's place as one of the masters of American storytelling.

With the angel on the roof, russell banks offers readers an astonishing collection of thirty years of his short fiction, revised especially for this volume and highlighted by the inclusion of nine new stories that are among the finest he has ever written.


Lost Memory of Skin

With nowhere else to go, the Kid takes up residence under a south Florida causeway, in a makeshift encampment with other convicted sex offenders. Barely beyond childhood himself, despite his crime, is in many ways an innocent, the Kid, trapped by impulses and foolish choices he himself struggles to comprehend.

The two men forge a tentative partnership, the Kid remaining wary of the Professor’s motives even as he accepts the counsel and financial assistance of the older man. When the camp beneath the causeway is raided by the police, and later, when a hurricane all but destroys the settlement, and understanding, the Professor tries to help the Kid in practical matters while trying to teach his young charge new ways of looking at, what he has done.

Known in his new identity only as the kid, and on probation after doing time for a liaison with an underage girl, he is shackled to a GPS monitoring device and forbidden to live within 2, 500 feet of anywhere children might gather. The acclaimed author of the sweet hereafter and rule of the bone returns with a provocative new novel that illuminates the shadowed edges of contemporary American culture with startling and unforgettable resultsSuspended in a strangely modern-day version of limbo, the young man at the center of Russell Banks’s uncompromising and morally complex new novel must create a life for himself in the wake of incarceration.

Enter the professor, a man who has built his own life on secrets and lies. But when the professor’s past resurfaces and threatens to destroy his carefully constructed world, the balance in the two men’s relationship shifts. Suddenly, the kid must reconsider everything he has come to believe, and choose what course of action to take when faced with a new kind of moral decision.

Long one of our most acute and insightful novelists, Russell Banks often examines the indistinct boundaries between our intentions and actions.


The Darling: A Novel

Hannah's encounter with taylor ultimately triggers a series of events whose momentum catches Hannah's family in its grip and forces her to make a heartrending choice. Hannah flees america for west africa, where she and her Liberian husband become friends of the notorious warlord and ex-president, Charles Taylor.

. Set in liberia and the united states from 1975 through 1991, The Darling is the story of Hannah Musgrave, a political radical and member of the Weather Underground.


The Reserve: A Novel P.S.

Twice married, vanessa has been scandalously linked to any number of rich and famous men. Part love story, politics, part murder mystery, love, art, russell banks's sharp-witted and deeply engaging new novel raises dangerous questions about class, and madness—and explores what happens when two powerful personalities, trapped at opposite ends of a social divide, set on the cusp of the Second World War, begin to break the rules.

Twenty-nine-year-old vanessa cole is a wild, stunningly beautiful heiress, the adopted only child of a highly regarded New York brain surgeon and his socialite wife. Jordan's reputation has preceded him; he is internationally known as much for his exploits and conquests as for his paintings themselves, and, here in the midst of the Great Depression, his leftist loyalties seem suspiciously undercut by his wealth and elite clientele.

But on the night of july 4, 1936, at her parents' country home in a remote adirondack mountain enclave known as The Reserve, Jordan Groves, and a mysteriously seductive local artist, two events coincide to permanently alter the course of Vanessa's callow life: her father dies suddenly of a heart attack, blithely lands his Waco biplane in the pristine waters of the forbidden Upper Lake.

But for all his worldly swagger, Jordan is as staggered by Vanessa's beauty and charm as she is by his defiant independence. Emotionally unstable from the start, and further unhinged by her father's unexpected death, Vanessa begins to spin wildly out of control, manipulating and destroying the lives of all who cross her path.

Moving from the secluded beauty of the adirondack wilderness to the skies above war-torn Spain and Fascist Germany, incisive, The Reserve is a clever, and passionately romantic novel of suspense that adds a new dimension to this acclaimed author's extraordinary repertoire.