Russell Banks

Part love story, part murder mystery, set on the cusp of the Second World War, Russell Banks' 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 begin to break the rules...

“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...

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...

“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.”...

""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...

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...

“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...

""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...

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...

The Darling is Hannah Musgrave's story, told emotionally and convincingly years later by Hannah herself. A political radical and member of the Weather Underground, Hannah has fled America to West Africa, where she and her Liberian husband become friends and colleagues of Charles Taylor, the...