Books by Russell Banks

The Darling: A Novel

by Russell Banks

A New York Times Notable Book • National Bestseller
“Russell Banks’s work presents without falsehood and with tough affection the uncompromising moral voice of our time. You find the craziness of false dreams, the political inequalities, and somehow the sliver of redemption.”—Michael Ondaatje
Set in Liberia and the United States from 1975 through 1991, The Darling, from acclaimed author Russell Banks, 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 make a heartrending choice.

The Darling

by Russell Banks

A New York Times Notable Book • National Bestseller
“Russell Banks’s work presents without falsehood and with tough affection the uncompromising moral voice of our time. You find the craziness of false dreams, the political inequalities, and somehow the sliver of redemption.”—Michael Ondaatje
Set in Liberia and the United States from 1975 through 1991, The Darling, from acclaimed author Russell Banks, 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 make a heartrending choice.

Continental Drift (HarperPerennial Modern Classics)

by Russell Banks

“The most convincing portrait I know of contemporary America . . . a great American novel.” — James Atlas, The Atlantic Monthly
From acclaimed author Russell Banks, a masterful novel of hope lost and gained—a gripping, indelible story of fragile lives uprooted and transformed by injustice, disappointment, and the seductions and realities of the American dream.
Banks's searing tale of uprootedness, migration, and exploitation in contemporary America brings together two of the dominant realms of his fiction—New England and the Caribbean—skillfully braided into one taut narrative. Continental Drift is the story of a young blue-collar worker and family man who abandons his broken dreams in New Hampshire and the story of a young Haitian woman who, with her nephew and baby, flees the brutal injustice and poverty of her homeland.
Continental Drift is a powerful literary classic from one of contemporary fiction's most important writers.

Foregone

by Russell Banks

The Inspiration for the Major Motion Picture O, Canada directed by Paul Schrader and starring Richard Gere, Uma Thurman, Jacob Elordi, and Michael Imperioli.
A searing novel about memory, abandonment, and betrayal from the acclaimed and bestselling Russell Banks
"During a career stretching almost half a century, Russell Banks has published an extraordinary collection of brave, morally imperative novels. . . . In this complex and powerful novel, we come face to face with the excruciating allure of redemption." —Washington Post
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, Malcolm MacLeod, in the presence of Fife’s wife and alongside Malcolm’s producer, cinematographer, and sound technician, all of whom have long admired Fife but who must now absorb the meaning of his astonishing, dark confession.
Imaginatively structured around Fife’s secret memories and alternating between the experiences of the characters who are filming his confession, the novel challenges our assumptions and understanding about a significant lost chapter in American history and the nature of memory itself. Russell Banks gives us a daring and resonant work about the scope of one man’s mysterious life, revealed through the fragments of his recovered past.

Foregone: A Novel

by Russell Banks

A searing novel about memory, abandonment, and betrayal from the acclaimed and bestselling Russell Banks 



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, Malcolm MacLeod, in the presence of Fife's wife and alongside Malcolm's producer, cinematographer, and sound technician, all of whom have long admired Fife but who must now absorb the meaning of his astonishing, dark confession.

Imaginatively structured around Fife's secret memories and alternating between the experiences of the characters who are filming his confession, the novel challenges our assumptions and understanding about a significant lost chapter in American history and the nature of memory itself. Russell Banks gives us a daring and resonant work about the scope of one man's mysterious life, revealed through the fragments of his recovered past.

Sweet Hereafter: A Novel

by Russell Banks

"Rich in imagery and the detail of small-town life and haunting in its portrayal of ordinary men and women struggling to understand loss. Under Mr. Banks's restrained craftsmanship, what begins as the story of senseless tragedy is transformed into an aspiring testament to hope and human resilience." — Atlanta Constitution
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?
Here is a stunning novel of "compelling moral suspense" (Los Angeles Times Book Review) from one of America's greatest storytellers.

The Angel on the Roof: The Stories of Russell Banks

by Russell Banks

"At his shattering best. . . Banks offers answers that are tough, honest, and inevitable without being simple. . . . A book that is not to be missed." —New York Times
With The Angel on the Roof, acclaimed author 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 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.

Rule of the Bone: A Novel

by Russell Banks

In the tradition Huckleberry Finn and The Catcher in the Rye, Russell Banks’s quintessential novel of a disaffected homeless youth living on the edge of society “redefines the young modern anti-hero. . . . Rule of the Bone has its own culture and language, and Bone is sure to become a beloved character for generations” (San Francisco Chronicle).
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, and then hides in the boarded-up summer house of a professor and his wife. He finally settles in an abandoned school bus with Rose, a child he rescues from a fast-talking pedophile. 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. It is an amazing journey of self-discovery through a world of magic, violence, betrayal and redemption.
With a compelling, off-beat protagonist evocative of Holden Caulfield and Quentin Coldwater, and a narrative voice that masterfully and naturally captures the nuances of a modern vernacular, Banks’s haunting and powerful novel is an indisputable—and unforgettable—modern classic.

Cloudsplitter

by Russell Banks

"Deeply affecting. . . . Like the best novels of Nadine Gordimer, it makes us appreciate the dynamic between the personal and the political, the public and the private, and the costs and causes of radical belief." — New York Times
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 our history during the years before the Civil War, when slavery was tearing the country apart. But within this broader scope, Russell Banks has given us a riveting, suspenseful, heartbreaking narrative filled with intimate scenes of domestic life, of violence and action in battle, 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.

Reserve, The: A Novel (P.S.)

by Russell Banks

“At once a harrowing mystery, an illuminating psychological novel of subverted love and family dysfunction, and a powerful commentary on class structure in America . . . [Banks is] one of America’s finest contemporary fiction writers.” —Boston Globe
Part love story, part murder mystery, set on the cusp of the Second World War, Russell Banks's sharp-witted and deeply engaging 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.
Vanessa Cole is a stunningly beautiful and wild heiress. Twice-married, she has been scandalously linked to rich and famous men. On the night of July 4, 1936, inside her family’s remote Adirondack Mountain enclave known as the Reserve, Vanessa will lose her father to a heart attack—and meet Jordan Groves, a seductively carefree local artist. Jordan is easy prey for Vanessa’s electrifying charm. But when Vanessa becomes unhinged by her father’s unexpected death, she begins to spin out of control, manipulating and destroying the lives of all who cross her path.
Moving from the secluded beauty of the Adirondacks to war-torn Spain and fascist Germany, and filled with characters that pierce the heart, The Reserve is a clever, incisive, and passionately romantic novel of suspense and drama.

Outer Banks: Three Early Novels

by Russell Banks

“Banks has skillfully used his repertoire of contemporary techniques to write a novel that is classically American—a dark, but sometimes funny, romance with echoes of Poe and Melville.” — Washington Post
"A marvelously written little book, fascinatingly intricate, yet deceptively simple. Well worth reading more than once." — New York Times Book Review
From acclaimed author Russell Banks comes a work of fiction utilizing a form invented in the seventeenth century by imprisoned Puritan divines
Designed to be exemplary, works of this type were aimed at brethren outside the prison walls and functioned primarily as figurative dramatizations of the tests of faith all true believers must endure. These “relations,” framed by scripture and by a sermon explicating the text, were usually read aloud in weekly or monthly installments during religious services. Utterly sincere and detailed recountings of suffering, they were nonetheless highly artificial. To use the form self-consciously, as Banks has done, is not to parody it so much as to argue good-humoredly with the mind it embodies, to explore and, if possible, to map the limits of that mind, the more intelligently to love it.

Lost Memory of Skin

by Russell Banks

“Of the many writers working in the great tradition today, one of the best is Russell Banks." —New York Times
?“Like our living literary giants Toni Morrison and Thomas Pynchon, Russell Banks is a great writer wrestling with the hidden secrets and explosive realities of this country.” —Cornel West
Lost Memory of Skin is a provocative novel of spiritual and moral redemption from Russell Banks, the author of Affliction, Rule of the Bone, Continental Drift, Cloudsplitter, and other acclaimed masterworks of contemporary American fiction.
Uncompromising and complex, Lost Memory of Skin is the story of The Kid, a young sex offender recently released from prison and forced to live beneath a South Florida causeway. When The Professor, a man of enormous intellect and appetite, takes The Kid under his wing, his own startling past will cause upheavals in both of their worlds. At once lyrical, witty, and disturbing, Banks’s extraordinary novel showcases his abilities as a world-class storyteller as well as his incisive understanding of the dangerous contradictions and hypocrisies of modern American society.

Permanent Member of the Family, A

by Russell Banks

A collection of twelve short works that portrays contemporary American family life visits morally complex themes in a fractured nation of inhabitants searching for connection and understanding.

A Permanent Member of the Family

by Russell Banks

A collection of short stories from the contemporary American master whom the New York Times declared "the most compassionate fiction writer working today."
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. “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.

Lost Memory of Skin: A Novel

by Russell Banks

“Like our living literary giants Toni Morrison and Thomas Pynchon, Russell Banks is a great writer wrestling with the hidden secrets and explosive realities of this country.”
—Cornel West
“Of the many writers working in the great tradition today, one of the best is Russell Banks.”
—New York Times
Lost Memory of Skin is a provocative novel of spiritual and moral redemption from Russell Banks, the author of Affliction, Rule of the Bone, Continental Drift, Cloudsplitter, and other acclaimed masterworks of contemporary American fiction. Uncompromising and complex, Lost Memory of Skin is the story of The Kid, a young sex offender recently released from prison and forced to live beneath a South Florida causeway. When The Professor, a man of enormous intellect and appetite, takes The Kid under his wing, his own startling past will cause upheavals in both of their worlds. At once lyrical, witty, and disturbing, Banks’s extraordinary novel showcases his abilities as a world-class storyteller as well as his incisive understanding of the dangerous contradictions and hypocrisies of modern American society.

The Magic Kingdom: A novel

by Russell Banks

From one of America’s most beloved storytellers: a dazzling tapestry of love and faith, memory and imagination that questions what it means to look back and accept one’s place in history. In 1971, Harley Mann revisits his childhood, recounting his family's move to Florida’s swamplands—mere miles away from what would become Disney World—to join a community of Shakers.

“Eerily timely. Can what’s gone wrong in the past offer keys to the future? The Magic Kingdom confronts our longings for Paradise; also the inner serpents that are to be found in all such enchanted gardens.” —Margaret Atwood, author of The Testaments, via Twitter

Property speculator Harley Mann begins recording his life story onto a reel-to-reel machine, reflecting on his youth in the early twentieth century. He recounts that after his father’s sudden death, his family migrated down to Florida to join a Shaker colony. Led by Elder John, a generous man with a mysterious past, the colony devoted itself to labor, faith, and charity, rejecting all temptations that lay beyond the property. Though this way of life initially saved Harley and his family from complete ruin, when Harley began falling in love with Sadie Pratt, a consumptive patient living on the grounds, his loyalty to the Shakers and their conservative worldview grew strained and, ultimately, broke.

As Harley dictates his story across more than half a century—meditating on youth, Florida’s everchanging landscape, and the search for an American utopia—the truth about Sadie, Elder John, and the Shakers comes to light, clarifying the past and present alike. With an expert eye and stunning vision, Russell Banks delivers a wholly captivating portrait of a man navigating Americana and the passage of time.

The Magic Kingdom: A novel

by Russell Banks

From one of America’s most beloved storytellers: a dazzling tapestry of love and faith, memory and imagination that questions what it means to look back and accept one’s place in history. In 1971, Harley Mann revisits his childhood, recounting his family's move to Florida’s swamplands—mere miles away from what would become Disney World—to join a community of Shakers.

“Eerily timely. Can what’s gone wrong in the past offer keys to the future? The Magic Kingdom confronts our longings for Paradise; also the inner serpents that are to be found in all such enchanted gardens.” —Margaret Atwood, author of The Testaments, via Twitter

Property speculator Harley Mann begins recording his life story onto a reel-to-reel machine, reflecting on his youth in the early twentieth century. He recounts that after his father’s sudden death, his family migrated down to Florida to join a Shaker colony. Led by Elder John, a generous man with a mysterious past, the colony devoted itself to labor, faith, and charity, rejecting all temptations that lay beyond the property. Though this way of life initially saved Harley and his family from complete ruin, when Harley began falling in love with Sadie Pratt, a consumptive patient living on the grounds, his loyalty to the Shakers and their conservative worldview grew strained and, ultimately, broke.

As Harley dictates his story across more than half a century—meditating on youth, Florida’s everchanging landscape, and the search for an American utopia—the truth about Sadie, Elder John, and the Shakers comes to light, clarifying the past and present alike. With an expert eye and stunning vision, Russell Banks delivers a wholly captivating portrait of a man navigating Americana and the passage of time.

American Spirits

by Russell Banks

From one of America’s most celebrated storytellers come three dark, interlocking tales about the residents of a rural New York town, and the shocking headlines that become their local mythologies.

A husband sells property to a mysterious, temperamental stranger, and is hounded on social media when he publicly questions the man’s character. A couple grows concerned when an enigmatic family moves next door, and the children start sneaking over to beg for help. Two dangerous criminals kidnap an elderly couple and begin blackmailing their grandson, demanding that he pay back what he owes.

Suspenseful, thrilling, and expertly crafted, American Spirits explores the hostile undercurrents of our communities and American politics at large, as well as the ways local tragedies can be both devastating and, somehow, everyday. Ushering the reader through the town of Sam Dent, Russell Banks has etched yet another brilliant entry into the bedrock of American fiction.

American Spirits

by Russell Banks

From one of America’s most celebrated storytellers come three dark, interlocking tales about the residents of a rural New York town, and the shocking headlines that become their local mythologies.

A husband sells property to a mysterious, temperamental stranger, and is hounded on social media when he publicly questions the man’s character. A couple grows concerned when an enigmatic family moves next door, and the children start sneaking over to beg for help. Two dangerous criminals kidnap an elderly couple and begin blackmailing their grandson, demanding that he pay back what he owes.

Suspenseful, thrilling, and expertly crafted, American Spirits explores the hostile undercurrents of our communities and American politics at large, as well as the ways local tragedies can be both devastating and, somehow, everyday. Ushering the reader through the town of Sam Dent, Russell Banks has etched yet another brilliant entry into the bedrock of American fiction.

Dreaming Up America

by Russell Banks

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.

The World Split Open: Great Authors on How and Why We Write (A Literary Arts Reader)

by Ursula K. Le Guin, Marilynne Robinson, Margaret Atwood, Russell Banks, Wallace Stegner, Jeanette Winterson, Robert Stone

Since 1984, Literary Arts has welcomed many of the world's most renowned authors and storytellers to its stage. In celebration of their thirty-year anniversary, Tin House Books has collected highlights from the series in a single volume. Since 1984, Literary Arts has welcomed many of the world’s most renowned authors and storytellers to its stage for one of the country’s largest lectures series. Sold-out crowds congregate at Portland’s Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall to hear these writers’ discuss their work and their thoughts on the trajectory of contemporary literature and culture. In celebration of Literary Arts’ thirty-year anniversary, Tin House Books has collected highlights from the series in a single volume. Whether it’s Wallace Stegner exploring how we use fiction to make sense of life or Ursula K. Le Guin on where ideas come from, Margaret Atwood on the need for complex female characters or Robert Stone on morality and truth in literature, Edward P. Jones on the role of imagination in historical novels or Marilynne Robinson on the nature of beauty, these essays illuminate not just the world of letters but the world at large.

Voyager Travel Writings

by Russell Banks

The acclaimed, award-winning novelist takes us on some of his most memorable journeys in this revelatory collection of travel essays that spans the globe, from the Caribbean to Scotland to the Himalayas.

Now in his mid-seventies, Russell Banks has indulged his wanderlust for more than half a century. “Since childhood, I’ve longed for escape, for rejuvenation, for wealth untold, for erotic and narcotic and sybaritic fresh starts, for high romance, mystery, and intrigue,” he writes in this compelling anthology. The longing for escape has taken him from the “bright green islands and turquoise seas” of the Caribbean islands to peaks in the Himalayas, the Andes, and beyond.

In Voyager, Russell Banks, a lifelong explorer, shares highlights from his travels: interviewing Fidel Castro in Cuba; motoring to a hippie reunion with college friends in Chapel Hill, North Carolina; eloping to Edinburgh, with his fourth wife, Chase; driving a sunset orange metallic Hummer down Alaska’s Seward Highway.

In each of these remarkable essays, Banks considers his life and the world. In Everglades National Park this “perfect place to time-travel,” he traces his own timeline. “I keep going back, and with increasingly clarity I see more of the place and more of my past selves. And more of the past of the planet as well.” Recalling his trips to the Caribbean in the title essay, “Voyager,” Banks dissects his relationships with the four women who would become his wives. In the Himalayas, he embarks on a different quest of self-discovery. “One climbs a mountain not to conquer it, but to be lifted like this away from the earth up into the sky,” he explains.

Pensive, frank, beautiful, and engaging, Voyager brings together the social, the personal, and the historical, opening a path into the heart and soul of this revered writer.

Voyager

by Russell Banks

“Banks’s narrative seductively juxtaposes rambles through lush volcanic mountains, white sand beaches and coral reefs with a barrage of memories of the hash he’s made of his private life.” —The New York Times Book Review
Russell Banks has indulged his wanderlust for more than half a century. This longing for escape has taken him from the “bright green islands and turquoise seas” of the Caribbean islands to peaks in the Himalayas, the Andes, and beyond.
In each of these remarkable essays, Banks considers his life and the world. In Everglades National Park this “perfect place to time-travel,” he traces his own timeline. Recalling his trips to the Caribbean in the title essay, “Voyager,” Banks dissects his relationships with the four women who would become his wives. In the Himalayas, he embarks on a different quest of self-discovery. “One climbs a mountain not to conquer it, but to be lifted like this away from the earth up into the sky,” he explains.
Pensive, frank, beautiful, and engaging, Voyager brings together the social, the personal, and the historical, opening a path into the heart and soul of this revered writer.