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. 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.

Wade whitehouse is an improbable protagonist for a tragedy. 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: A Novel

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? In the sweet hereafter, Russell Banks tells a story that begins with a school bus accident.

Continental Drift P.S.

Now available for the first time in e-book format, disappointment, and a gripping, indelible story of fragile lives uprooted and transformed by injustice, 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 the seductions and realities of the American dream.

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Where I'm Calling From: Selected Stories Vintage Contemporaries

By the time of his early death in 1988, raymond carver had established himself as one of the great practitioners of the American short story, a writer who had not only found his own voice but imprinted it in the imaginations of thousands of readers. Where i’m calling from, and earlier carver volumes, his last collection, encompasses classic stories from Cathedral, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, along with seven new works previously unpublished in book form.

Together, these 37 stories give us a superb overview of Carver’s life work and show us why he was so widely imitated but never equaled.

Cloudsplitter: A Novel

Deeply researched, brilliantly plotted, cloudsplitter is dazzling in its re-creation of the political and social landscape of our history during the years before the Civil War, and peopled with a cast of unforgettable characters both historical and wholly invented, when slavery was tearing the country apart.

But within this broader scope, suspenseful, heartbreaking narrative filled with intimate scenes of domestic life, of violence and action in battle, Russell Banks has given us a riveting, 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.

. 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.

Rule of the Bone: A Novel

During this time, he slips into drugs and petty crime. 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.

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. He finally settles in an abandoned schoolbus with Rose, a child he rescues from a fast-talking pedophile. Rejected by his parents, he claims for himself a new identity as a permanent outsider; he gets a crossed-bones tattoo on his arm, out of school and in trouble with the police, 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.

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.

The Orphan Master's Son: A Novel Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

Imagine charles dickens paying a visit to Pyongyang, and you see the canvas on which Adam Johnson is painting here. The washington post pak jun do is the haunted son of a lost mother—a singer “stolen” to Pyongyang—and an influential father who runs a work camp for orphans. Johnson has written a daring and remarkable novel, a novel that not only opens a frightening window on the mysterious kingdom of North Korea, but one that also excavates the very meaning of love and sacrifice.

Michiko kakutani, the new York Times “Rich with a sense of discovery. The orphan master’s Son has an early lead on novel of the year. The daily beast “This is a novel worth getting excited about. The washington post “a ripping piece of fiction that is also an astute commentary on the nature of freedom, sacrifice, and glory.

Elle. He becomes a professional kidnapper who must navigate the shifting rules, arbitrary violence, and baffling demands of his overlords in order to stay alive. The pulitzer prize–winning, new york Times betselling novel of North Korea: an epic journey into the heart of the world’s most mysterious dictatorship.

Driven to the absolute limit of what any human being could endure, a legendary actress “so pure, Sun Moon, he boldly takes on the treacherous role of rival to Kim Jong Il in an attempt to save the woman he loves, she didn’t know what starving people looked like. Part breathless thriller, part story of innocence lost, corruption, stolen moments of beauty, and casual cruelty but also camaraderie, part story of romantic love, The Orphan Master’s Son is also a riveting portrait of a world heretofore hidden from view: a North Korea rife with hunger, and love.

Lost Memory of Skin

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. 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, when a hurricane all but destroys the settlement, and understanding, the Professor tries to help the Kid in practical matters while trying to teach his young charge new ways of looking at, and later, what he has done. Enter the professor, a man who has built his own life on secrets and lies.

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 resultsSuspended 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, is in many ways an innocent, the Kid, despite his crime, trapped by impulses and foolish choices he himself struggles to comprehend.

All the King's Men

Winner of the pulitzer prize, this classic book is generally regarded as the finest novel ever written on American politics. It describes the career of Willie Stark, a back-country lawyer whose idealism is overcome by his lust for power. .

The Reserve: A Novel P.S.

. 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. 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, incisive, The Reserve is a clever, and passionately romantic novel of suspense that adds a new dimension to this acclaimed author's extraordinary repertoire. Twice married, vanessa has been scandalously linked to any number of rich and famous men.

But on the night of july 4, 1936, and a mysteriously seductive local artist, jordan groves, two events coincide to permanently alter the course of Vanessa's callow life: her father dies suddenly of a heart attack, at her parents' country home in a remote Adirondack Mountain enclave known as The Reserve, blithely lands his Waco biplane in the pristine waters of the forbidden Upper Lake.

Part love story, love, art, part murder mystery, trapped at opposite ends of a social divide, set on the cusp of the Second World War, and madness—and explores what happens when two powerful personalities, politics, Russell Banks's sharp-witted and deeply engaging new novel raises dangerous questions about class, 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. 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.