. 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
. 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
Continental Drift P.S.
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Affliction
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
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
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
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
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
. 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.
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.