Russell Banks Books In Order

Standalone Novels In Publication Order

  1. Snow (1974)
  2. Trailerpark (1981)
  3. Relation of My Imprisonment (1983)
  4. Continental Drift (1985)
  5. Family Life (1985)
  6. The Book of Jamaica (1986)
  7. Hamilton Stark (1986)
  8. Affliction (1989)
  9. The Sweet Hereafter (1991)
  10. Rule of the Bone (1995)
  11. Cloudsplitter (1998)
  12. The Darling (2004)
  13. The Reserve (2008)
  14. Lost Memory of Skin (2011)
  15. Foregone (2021)

Collections In Publication Order

  1. Searching for Survivors (1975)
  2. The New World (1979)
  3. Success Stories (1986)
  4. The Angel on the Roof (1999)
  5. A Permanent Member of the Family (2013)

Non-Fiction Books In Publication Order

  1. Dreaming Up America (2008)
  2. Voyager (2016)

Anthologies In Publication Order

  1. Brushes With Greatness: An Anthology of Chance Encounters With Greatness (1989)
  2. The Best American Mystery Stories 2001 (2001)
  3. The Best American Mystery Stories 2014 (2014)
  4. The Writer’s Library (2020)

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Russell Banks Books Overview

Trailerpark

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 andscreams 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 offers gripping, realistic portrayals of individual Americans and paints a portrait of New England life that is at once dark, witty, and revealing.

Relation of My Imprisonment

The Relation of My Imprisonment 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 dramatization of the test of fait all true believers must endure. These ‘relation,’ 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 recounting of suffering, they were nonetheless highly artificial. To use the form self consciously, as Russell 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.

Continental Drift

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.

Family Life

In Family Life, Russell Banks’s first novel, he transforms the dramas of domesticity into the story of a royal family in a mythical contemporary kingdom. Life inside this kingdom includes the king dubbed ‘the Hearty’ or ‘the Bluff’, who squeals angrily as is his wont; the queen, who, while pondering the mirror in her chambers, decides to write a book; three adolescent princes who are, respectively, a superb wrestler, a fanatical sports car driver, and a sullen drunk. Then there are the mysterious Green Man with a thing for princes; the Loon, who lives in a tree house designed by Christopher Wren; and a whole slew of murders, mayhem, coups, debauches, world tours, and love and loss and laughter.

The Book of Jamaica

Banks explores the complexities of political life in the Caribbean.

Hamilton Stark

Hamilton Stark is a New Hampshire pipe fitter and the sole inhabitant of the house from which he evicted his own mother. He is the villain of five marriages and the father of a daughter so obsessed that she has been writing a book about him for years. Hamilton Stark is a boor, a misanthrope, a handsome man: funny, passionately honest, and a good dancer. The narrator, a middle aged writer, decides to write about Stark as a hero whose anger and solitude represent passion and wisdom. At the same time that he tells Hamilton Stark‘s story, he describes the process of writing the novel and the complicated connections between truth and fiction. As Stark slips in and out of focus, maddeningly elusive and fascinatingly complex, this beguiling novel becomes at once a compelling meditation on identity and a thoroughly engaging story of life on the cold edge of New England.

Affliction

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 becomes as spellbinding and inexorable as a fuse burning its way to the dynamite.

The Sweet Hereafter

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?

Rule of the Bone

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 schoolbus 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.

Cloudsplitter

Russell Banks’s gift for creating compelling stories populated by gritty and startlingly real characters has resulted in such acclaimed masterworks as Continental Drift, The Sweet Hereafter, and his most recent bestseller, Rule of the Bone. Now Banks takes on one of American history’s most misunderstood figures, John Brown, whose October 1859 raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, crossed the line from civil protest to armed struggle, prefiguring the greatest conflagration in this country’s history. Narrated by the enigmatic abolitionist’s son Owen, the novel dazzlingly re creates the fractured political and social landscape of pre Civil War America, when slavery and talk of secession were tearing the country apart. But Cloudsplitter is about much more than one man’s quest for political change and social justice. It is a moving and powerfully told story of fathers and sons, of racial conflict and division, as well as an intimate portrait of 19th century family life. Rich in incident and exquisite detail, Cloudsplitter is the novel that will elevate Russell Banks to the highest rank of 20th century American authors.

The Darling

After many years of believing that I never dream of anything, I dreamed of Africa. Over a decade after leaving her three sons behind in Liberia, Hannah Musgrave realizes she has to leave her farm in the Adirondacks and find out what has happened to them and the chimpanzees for whom she created a sanctuary. The Darling is the story of her return to the wreckage of west Africa and the story of her past, from her middle class American upbringing to her years in the Weather Underground. It is also one of the most powerful novels of the decade, an unforgettable tale of growth and loss, and an unstinting exploration of some of the most troubling issues of our time: terrorism, race, and the contact between the first world and the third. Hannah Musgrave, the narrator of The Darling, tells us she first travelled to Africa in the mid 1970s, to escape prosecution for her radical political activities with the Weathermen. Arriving in Liberia to work in a medical research lab, Hannah also known by her alias, Dawn Carrington meets Woodrow Sundiata, an official in the ministry of public health, and they fall immediately in love. Courting with Woodrow, an intelligent, ambitious man, means encountering his other life in his ancestral village of Fuama a life that could scarcely be more different from Hannah’s affluent childhood as the daughter of a bestselling pediatrician. Hannah and Woodrow start a family, but she feels herself to be somehow estranged from her life in Liberia and curiously detached from her husband and three sons. Still in search of herself as her children grow older, Hannah develops a closer and closer bond with the chimpanzees at the lab, whom she calls dreamers. During the early 1980s, Liberian society grows more unstable, until an illiterate soldier named Samuel Doe brutally overthrows and assassinates the president. Hannah s courageous intervention with Doe leads to Woodrow s release from detention, but at a price: she must return to the US, leaving her family behind. Hannah feels that her dreamers will feel her absence more deeply than her family will. In the US Hannah briefly reconnects with her parents after years of estrangement before returning to her friends from her underground years. One of them, Zack Procter, is involved with a plan to spring Charles Taylor an attractive Liberian politician from jail, and Hannah involves herself with the plot, genuinely believing that Taylor will bring social democracy to west Africa. Hannah gets permission to return to her family in the mid 1980s, and decides that this time things will be different: she will take charge of her home life, ousting Woodrow s young cousin Jeanette, and she will build a sanctuary for her chimpanzees. But Charles Taylor has also returned, and his slow and bloody rebellion against Doe leads, eventually, to a night of horrific violence in which Woodrow is murdered and Hannah s teenaged children disappear. Amidst chaos and almost unbelievable bloodshed, Hannah has time only to move her dreamers to Boniface Island before facing the heartrending decision to escape Liberia, leaving her children behind. More than ten years will pass before she can return to discover their fate, and understand her own.

The Reserve

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 regarded New York brain surgeon and his socialite wife. Twice married, Vanessa has been scandalously linked to any number of rich and famous men. But on the night of July 4, 1936, at her parents’ country home in a remote Adirondack Mountain enclave known as The Reserve, two events coincide to permanently alter the course of Vanessa’s callow life: her father dies suddenly of a heart attack, and a mysteriously seductive local artist, Jordan Groves, blithely lands his Waco biplane in the pristine waters of the forbidden Upper Lake…
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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 for all his worldly swagger, Jordan is as staggered by Vanessa’s beauty and charm as she is by his defiant independence. He falls easy prey to her electrifying personality, but it is not long before he discovers that the heiress carries a dark, deeply scarring family secret. 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, The Reserve is a clever, incisive, and passionately romantic novel of suspense that adds a new dimension to this acclaimed author’s extraordinary repertoire.

Lost Memory of Skin

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 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. With nowhere else to go, the Kid takes up residence under a south Florida causeway, in a makeshift encampment with other convicted sex offenders. Barely beyond childhood himself, the Kid, despite his crime, is in many ways an innocent, trapped by impulses and foolish choices he himself struggles to comprehend. Enter the Professor, a man who has built his own life on secrets and lies. A university sociologist of enormous size and intellect, he finds in the Kid the perfect subject for his research on homelessness and recidivism among convicted sex offenders. 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, the Professor tries to help the Kid in practical matters while trying to teach his young charge new ways of looking at, and understanding, what he has done. 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. A mature and masterful work of contemporary fiction from one of our most accomplished storytellers, Lost Memory of Skin unfolds in language both powerful and beautifully lyrical, show casing Banks at his most compelling, his reckless sense of humor and intense empathy at full bore. The perfect convergence of writer and subject, Lost Memory of Skin probes the zeitgeist of a troubled society where zero tolerance has erased any hope of subtlety and compassion a society where isolating the offender has perhaps created a new kind of victim.

Success Stories

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 a Southeast Asian village, The Gully tells of the profitability of violence and the ironies of upward mobility in a Latin American shantytown, and Chrildren’s Story explores the repressed rage that boils beneath the surface of relationships between parents and children and between citizens of the first and third worlds.

The Angel on the Roof

After nine critically acclaimed novels, Russell Banks has firmly established himself as one of the great American novelists. But throughout his career, Banks has also been a master of the short form, publishing four story collections, winning O. Henry and Best American Short Story prizes and awards, and contributing stories to such publications as Esquire, the Boston Globe Magazine, and the Voice Literary Supplement. Now, with The Angel on the Roof Banks offers readers an astonishing collection of 30 years of short fiction. As is characteristic of all Banks’s works, these stories resonate with irony and compassion, honesty and insight, extending into the vast territory of the heart and world, from working class New England to Florida and the Caribbean and Africa. Along with nine new stories, Banks has selected the best pieces from his previous collections and revised them especially for this volume. Broad in scope and rich in imagination, The Angel on the Roof is a true representation of the breadth of Russell Banks’s work and affirms his place as one of the masters of modern American storytelling.

Dreaming Up America

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 Best American Mystery Stories 2001

Since its inception in 1915, the Best American series has become the premier annual showcase for the country’s finest short fiction and nonfiction. For each volume, a series editor reads hundreds of pieces from dozens of periodicals, then selects between fifty and a hundred outstanding works. That selection is pared down to the twenty or so very best pieces by a guest editor who is widely recognized as a leading writer in his or her field. This unique system has helped make the Best American series the most respected and most popular of its kind. The Best American Mystery Stories 2001 will thrill fans of all reaches of the genre. The legendary mystery writer Lawrence Block offers chilling tales from best selling writers as well as talented up and comers. Ranging from traditional detective cases to psychological studies to atmospheric scene setters, these stories illustrate the variety and broad range of styles, plots, and characters Block admires in the genre. With Block as guest editor and a stellar roster of suspense veterans and rising stars, the 2001 edition will delight mystery afcionados and all lovers of great fiction.

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