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Russell Banks
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Russell Banks was raised in New Hampshire and eastern Massachusetts.
The eldest of four children, he grew up in a working-class,
hardscrabble world that has played a major role in shaping
his writing. Banks (the first in his family to go to college)
attended Colgate University "for less than a semester,"
and later graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Before he could support himself
as a writer, he tried his hand at plumbing, and worked as
a shoe salesman and window dresser. More recently, he has
taught at Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence, University
of New Hampshire, New England College and New York University.
A prolific writer of fiction, his titles include: Searching
for Survivors, Family Life, Hamilton Stark,
The New World, The Book of Jamaica, Trailerpark,
The Relation of My Imprisonment, Continental Drift,
Success Stories, Affliction and The Sweet
Hereafter. Banks has also contributed poems, stories
and essays to The Boston Globe Magazine, Vanity
Fair, The New York Times Book Review, Esquire,
Harper's and many other publications.
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Cloudsplitter |
The cover of Russell Banks's mountain-sized novel Cloudsplitter
features an actual photo of Owen Brown, the son of John Brown--the
hero of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" whose
terrorist band murdered proponents of slavery in Kansas and
attacked Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in 1859 on what... Read
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The
Sweet Hereafter : A Novel |
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... Read
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Rule
of the Bone : A Novel |
In a voice totally authentic to its speaker, Banks narrates
in first-person the sad story of a teenage boy whose aimlessness
leads him to steal from his mother in order to buy pot; as
a result, he is kicked out of the house. As a drifter, he's
too young and inexperienced to take advantage of other...
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Continental
Drift |
Early in Continental Drift, Russell Banks compares
the migrations of humanity to those of the elements: tides,
winds, whole landmasses making their well-mapped, decorous
circuit of the planet. One of the marvels of this book is
the way it combines such an aerial perspective with particular,...
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