Russell Banks, who died Sunday at 82, circled similar themes across his many novels. For new readers and fans alike, here are the five most essential.
Telling the story of a struggling New England laborer and a Haitian woman whose lives intersect off the coast of Florida, this is Banks’ grand, brilliant epic — and the best place to start with him. Banks captures the sense of the American dream sinking fast on two fronts, delivering a melancholy but spirited attack on promises of easy money and human cruelty. Banks was determined, as the book’s final line puts it, to “help destroy the world as it is.
At one point near the end of this novel about male brutality and family violence and squalor, the narrator asks a question that strikes fear into the reader’s heart--not fear of violence, but fear that the question may suggest much more about Russell Banks’ new novel than could have been intended.Chappie, the straight-talking 14-year-old hero of this novel, bails on his very Banks-ian abusive stepfather, heading from upstate New York to Jamaica, where he becomes embroiled in the drug trade.
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Russell Banks, praised author of ‘Cloudsplitter,’ dies at 82He was a plumber’s son who wrote often about working class families and those who died trying to break out.
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Russell Banks, praised author of 'Cloudsplitter,' dies at 82NEW YORK (AP) — Russell Banks, an award-winning fiction writer who rooted such novels as “Affliction” and “The Sweet Hereafter” in the wintry, rural communities of his native Northeast and imagined the dreams and downfalls of everyone from modern blue-collar workers to the radical abolitionist John Brown, has died.
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Russell Banks, praised author of ‘Cloudsplitter,’ dies at 82He was a plumber’s son who wrote often about working class families and those who died trying to break out.
Read more »
Russell Banks, praised author of 'Cloudsplitter,' dies at 82Banks was an award-winning fiction writer who rooted such novels as “Affliction” and “The Sweet Hereafter” in the wintry, rural communities of his native Northeast.
Read more »
Russell Banks, praised author of 'Cloudsplitter,' dies at 82Banks was an award-winning fiction writer who rooted such novels as “Affliction” and “The Sweet Hereafter” in the wintry, rural communities of his native Northeast.
Read more »
Russell Banks, praised author of ‘Cloudsplitter,’ dies at 82Banks, a professor emeritus at Princeton University, died Saturday in upstate New York, his editor, Dan Halpern, told The Associated Press. Banks was being treated for cancer, Halpern said.
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