Russell Banks
Author
Language
English
Description
"At the center of Foregone is famed Canadian American leftist documentary filmmaker Leonard Fife, one of sixty thousand draft evaders and deserters who fled to Canada to avoid serving in Vietnam. Fife, now in his late seventies, is dying of cancer in Montreal and has agreed to a final interview in which he is determined to bare all his secrets at last, to demythologize his mythologized life. The interview is filmed by his acolyte and ex-star student,...
Author
Pub. Date
c2011
Language
English
Formats
Description
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 results
Suspended 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. Known in his new identity only...
Author
Publisher
HarperCollinsPublishers
Pub. Date
c1991
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 6.5 - AR Pts: 12
Language
English
Description
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?
5) The Reserve
Author
Language
English
Description
Part love story, part murder mystery, set on the cusp of the Second World War, Russell Banks's sharp-witted and deeply engaging new novel raises dangerous questions about class, politics, art, love, and madness-and explores what happens when two powerful personalities, trapped at opposite ends of a social divide, begin to break the rules. Twenty-nine-year-old Vanessa Cole is a wild, stunningly beautiful heiress, the adopted only child of a highly...
Author
Publisher
Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
Pub. Date
[2016]
Language
English
Description
The award-winning novelist takes us on some of his most memorable journeys in this revelatory collection of travel essays. Now in his mid-seventies, Russell Banks has indulged his wanderlust for more than half a century. In this compelling anthology, he writes that since childhood he has "longed for escape, for rejuvenation, for wealth untold, for erotic and narcotic and sybaritic fresh starts, for high romance, mystery and intrigue." The longing...
Author
Publisher
HarperPerennial
Pub. Date
c1998
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 8.3 - AR Pts: 48
Language
English
Description
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, brilliantly plotted, and peopled with a cast of unforgettable characters both historical and wholly invented, Cloudsplitter is dazzling in its re-creation of the political and social landscape of...
8) The darling
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
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. Hannah flees America for West Africa, where she and her Liberian husband become friends of the notorious warlord and ex-president, Charles Taylor. Hannah's encounter with Taylor ultimately triggers a series of events whose momentum catches Hannah's family in its grip and forces her to...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
In 1971, a property speculator named Harley Mann begins recording his life story onto a reel-to-reel machine. Reflecting on his childhood in the early twentieth century, Harley recounts that after his father's sudden death, his family migrated down to Florida's swamplands--mere miles away from what would become Disney World--to join a community of Shakers. Led by Elder John, a generous man with a mysterious past, the colony devoted itself to labor,...
11) Rule of the bone
Author
Publisher
HarperPerennial
Pub. Date
c1996
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 6.4 - AR Pts: 20
Language
English
Description
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. During this time, he slips into drugs and petty crime. Rejected by his parents, out of school and in trouble with the police, he claims for himself a new identity as a permanent outsider; he gets a crossed-bones tattoo on his arm, and takes the name "Bone." He finds dangerous refuge with a group of biker-thieves,...
12) Trailerpark
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
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 and screams 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, Russell Banks...
Author
Publisher
HarperPerennial
Pub. Date
2007, c1985
Language
English
Description
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, and a gripping, indelible story of fragile lives uprooted and transformed by injustice, disappointment, and the seductions and realities of the American dream.
14) Affliction
Author
Publisher
Harper
Pub. Date
1989
Language
English
Description
Wade Whitehouse is an improbable protagonist for a tragedy. 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. Told by his articulate, equally scarred younger brother, Wade's story...
15) Success stories
Author
Publisher
Harper & Row
Pub. Date
c1986
Language
English
Description
In Sucess Stories, an exceptionally varied yet coherent collection, Russell Banks proves himself one of the most astute and forceful writers in America today. Queen for a Day, Success Story, and Adultery trace fortunes of the Painter family in there pursuit of and retreat from the American dream. Banks also explores the ethos of rampant materialism in a group of contemporary moral fables. The Fish is an evocating parable of faith and greed set in...
Author
Publisher
HarperCollins Publishers
Pub. Date
2000
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 7.2 - AR Pts: 29
Language
English
Description
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. 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...
Author
Publisher
Seven Stories Press
Pub. Date
c2008
Language
English
Description
With America ever under global scrutiny, Russell Banks contemplates the questions of our origins, values, heroes, conflicts, and contradictions. He writes with conversational ease and emotional insight, drawing on contemporary politics, literature, film, and his knowledge of American history.
Author
Series
Publisher
HarperCollins Publishers
Pub. Date
[2021]
Language
English
Description
Originating in the folktale and with an occasional infusion of gothic horror or fantasy, A. E. Coppard's stories still feel fresh and surprising today. Coppard came to the short story later in life but left an indelible mark on it. Staunch in his belief that the short story was a distinctive form with little relation to the novel, he wove his tales out of the substance of life in the English countryside, with its memorable and distinctive characters....
20) Affliction
Publisher
Largo Entertainment
Pub. Date
c1997, 1999
Language
English
Description
When events shatter the quiet of his small town, Wade Whitehouse (Nolte), with the aid of his new girlfriend (Spacek), is forced to confront his past and examine his life.