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Russell Banks
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Afflictionby Russell BanksISBN 0060920076 (0-06-092007-6)
Softcover, Harpercollins
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Affliction'Book summary:If Russell Banks hadn't become a writer, he thinks he would have wound up stabbed to death in a barroom brawl. He is the son of a two-fisted, drunken New England plumber, and the grief of fatherly combat resonates through his work like the background radiation of the big bang. Banks became a violently drinking plumber himself--and then a Pulitzer Prize-nominated Princeton literary giant and one of the luckiest Oscar-buzzed writers in Hollywood history.
(The Atom Egoyan adaptation of Banks's brilliant novel The Sweet Hereafter perfectly captures its brooding beauty, and Affliction may be Paul Schrader's finest film since he wrote Taxi Driver.)
Affliction transmutes Banks's painful past into fiction. His divorced protagonist, Wade Whitehouse, 41, is imprisoned by fate in Lawford, New Hampshire, a hell frozen over. He digs wells for chump change, lives in a trailer, drinks, and alienates his daughter by dragging her to a miserable Halloween costume party. In two weeks' time, Wade demolishes his pitiable hopes of family happiness, drawn into a rigorously plausible series of disastrous deaths. In flashbacks to his Dad-abused youth, we see how Wade wound up such a Dostoyevskian clown.
Banks has a mind of winter: when Wade sees his dead parent, the scene unfolds with the cold logic of ice-crystal formation. The story is narrated by Wade's kid brother, the family's sole escapee to college, in a cool, distanced way. Both brothers contain aspects of Banks, but each breaks free of autobiography. This is one haunting novel. [via]
The Angel on the Roofby Russell BanksISBN 0060931256 (0-06-093125-6)
Softcover, Perennial
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Angel on the Roof'Book summary:Russell Banks (The Sweet Hereafter, Affliction) started out as a poet, and nowhere is this more evident than in his 37 years' worth of exquisite short stories, collected here in one hefty volume for the first time. In a mournfully lyrical phrase, he can evoke his characteristic landscape, the icy northeastern U.S.: "The air was crystalline, almost absent. The fields lay like aged plates of bone--dry, scoured by the cold until barren of possibility, incapable even of decomposition." Though his stories venture to Jamaica and Africa, Banks keeps coming back to New Hampshire and the themes of divorce, poverty, violence, and what he calls "the old father-and-son thing." He's not slumming in his trailer-park tales: his own drunken prole father beat him brutally, and Banks knows how grief and guilt shatter and unite families and small towns.
Characters often crop up in more than one story, giving the setting novelistic depth, drawing us into each life. In "Queen for a Day," we meet the young children of the Painter clan of New Hampshire as their dad is abandoning their mom, who then loses her job. "They run to her and wrap her in their arms... the three of them wind around each other like snakes moving in and out of one another's coils." In "Firewood," Painter's grown children rebuff his offer of fuel for their hearth, repaying his indifference, and Banks gives us a bad-guy's-eye view of their shared loneliness. In "The Fisherman," a $50,000 lottery is won by an old ice fisherman who stashes it in a cigar box, eliciting character-revealing reactions from the trailer-park denizens. "Dis Bwoy, Him Gwan" further reveals why the local pothead Bruce Severance so urgently needs the fisherman's money. The stories resonate and illuminate each other, the dialogue is pitch-perfect, and the collection has the cohesiveness of a 500-page novel. Banks's prose has the stark grace of classical tragedy. He's a poet after all. --Tim Appelo [via]
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Bridge Of San Luis Reyby Russell BanksISBN 0060088877 (0-06-008887-7)
Softcover, Perennial
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Bridge Of San Luis Rey'Book summary:"On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below." With this celebrated sentence, Thornton Wilder begins The Bridge of San Luis Rey, one of the towering achievements in American fiction and a novel read throughout the world.
By chance, a monk witnesses the tragedy. Brother Juniper seeks to prove that it was divine intervention rather than chance that led to the deaths of those who perished in the tragedy. His study leads to his own death -- and to the author's timeless investigation into the nature of love and the meaning of the human condition.
The Bridge of San Luis Rey is now reissued in this handsome hardcover edition featuring a new foreword by Russell Banks. Tappan Wilder has written an engaging and thought-provoking afterword, which includes unpublished notes for the Pulitzer Prizewinning novel, illuminating photographs, and other remarkable documentary material. Granville Hicks's insightful comment about Wilder suggests an inveterate truth: "As a craftsman he is second to none, and there are few who have looked deeper into the human heart."
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Cloudsplitterby Russell BanksISBN 0060930861 (0-06-093086-1)
Softcover, Harpercollins
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Cloudsplitter Pt. 1: A Novelby Russell BanksISBN 0060168609 (0-06-016860-9)
Hardcover, HarperCollins Publishers
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Continental Driftby Russell BanksISBN 000648557X (0-00-648557-X)
Softcover, HarperCollins Canada, Limited
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The Darlingby Russell BanksISBN 0060957352 (0-06-095735-2)
Softcover, Perennial
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The Invisible Stranger: The Patten, Maine, Photographs of Arturo Pattenby Arturo Patten, Russell BanksISBN 0060192348 (0-06-019234-8)
Hardcover, HarperCollins Publishers
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The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Storyby Arturo Patten, Russell BanksISBN 0060911301 (0-06-091130-1)
Softcover, Granite Impex Ltd
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Regions Near And Far: Level 4by Russell Banks , Gloria Ladson-BillingsISBN 0021464200 (0-02-146420-0)
Hardcover, Macmillan/McGraw-Hill School Div
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Rule of the Boneby Russell BanksISBN 0060927240 (0-06-092724-0)
Softcover, Harpercollins
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Rule of the Bone'Book summary:In the tradition Huckleberry Finn and The Catcherin the Rye, Russell Bankss quintessential novel of adisaffected homeless youth living on the edge of society redefines theyoung modern anti-hero. . . . Rule of the Bone has its own culture andlanguage, and Bone is sure to become a beloved character for generations (SanFrancisco Chronicle). Witha compelling, off-beat protagonist evocative of Holden Caulfield and QuentinColdwater, and a narrative voice that masterfully and naturally captures thenuances of a modern vernacular, Bankss haunting and powerful novel is anindisputableand unforgettablemodern classic. [via]
Russell Banks Reading Continental Driftby Russell BanksISBN 0060854944 (0-06-085494-4)
Softcover, Harpercollins
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- Russell Banks Reading Continental Drift: ISBN 0060925744 (0-06-092574-4)
Softcover, Harpercollins - Russell Banks Reading Continental Drift: ISBN 0060956739 (0-06-095673-9)
Softcover, Harpercollins - Russell Banks Reading Continental Drift: ISBN 0060153830 (0-06-015383-0)
Hardcover, Harpercollins - Russell Banks Reading Continental Drift: ISBN 0060854944 (0-06-085494-4)
Softcover, Harpercollins
- Russell Banks Reading Continental Drift: ISBN 0060925744 (0-06-092574-4)
Success Storiesby Russell BanksISBN 0060927194 (0-06-092719-4)
Softcover, Harpercollins
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The Sweet Hereafterby Russell BanksISBN 0060923245 (0-06-092324-5)
Softcover, Perennial
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Sweet Hereafter'Book summary:Atom Egoyan's Oscar-nominated The Sweet Hereafter is a good movie, remarkably faithful to the spirit of Russell Banks's novel of the same name, but Banks's book is twice as good. With the cool logic of accreting snowflakes, his prose builds a world--a small U.S. town near Canada--and peoples it with four vivid, sensitive souls linked by a school-bus tragedy: the bus driver; the widowed Vietnam vet who was driving behind the bus, waving at his kids, when it went off the road; the perpetually peeved negligence lawyer who tries to shape the victims' heartaches into a winning case; and the beauty-queen cheerleader crippled by the crash, whose testimony will determine everyone's fate.
We experience the story from inside the heads of the four characters in turn--each knowing things the others don't, each misunderstanding the facts in his or her own way. The method resembles Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and Gilbert Sorrentino's stunning Aberration of Starlight, but Banks's achievement is most comparable to John Updike's tales of ordinary small-towners preternaturally gifted with slangy eloquence, psychological insights, and alertness to life's tiniest details.
Egoyan's film is haunting but vague--it leaves viewers in the dark regarding several critical plot points. Banks's book is more haunting still, and precise, making every revelation count, with a finale far superior to that of the film. It's also wittier than the too-sober flick: the lawyer dismisses the dome-dwelling hippie parents of one of the crash victims as being "lost in their Zen Little Indians fantasy," which casts a sharp light on them and him, too. He's lost in his calculations of how each parent will fit into the legal system, and the ways in which he fits into the tragedy are lost on him. If only he and the Vietnam-vet dad could read each other's account of their tense first encounter, both of them might get what the other is missing.
Banks's wit is pitiless--it's painful when we discover that the bus driver, who prides herself on interpreting for her stroke-impaired husband, is translating his wise but garbled observations all wrong. The crash turns out not to be the ultimate tragedy: in the cold northern light of its aftermath, we discover that we're all in this alone. [via]
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