L'écriture de Russell Banks explore la vie de gens ordinaires aux prises avec l'adversité et les complexités de l'expérience américaine. Ses récits explorent souvent des thèmes profonds de culpabilité, de rédemption et de recherche d'identité. Banks capture magistralement les réalités brutes et les psychologies complexes de ses personnages, créant des œuvres profondément résonnantes et souvent troublantes.
Un mari humilié qui rôde dans la maison de son ex-femme, des mythomanes qui prennent leurs semblables en otage, un serveur déprimé qui invente à une inconnue une vie qui n'est pas la sienne pour la sauver d'un hypothétique désespoir, des femmes noires qui sont traquées par des pit-bulls sur des parkings... Des hommes et des femmes qui, pour transcender leur existence ordinaire, mentent ou affabulent à l'envi, sous le soleil de Miami ou sous des cieux plus sombres. Dans ces douze nouvelles d'une extraordinaire intensité et peuplées de personnages cheminant sur le fil du rasoir, Russell Banks convoque les angoisses et les tensions régissant les relations humaines et transmue magistralement le réel et le quotidien en paraboles métaphysiques.
A cinquante-neuf ans, Hannah Musgrave fait retour sur son itinéraire de jeune Américaine issue de la bourgeoisie aisée de gauche que les péripéties de son engagement révolutionnaire avaient conduite, au début des années 1970, à se "planquer" en Afrique. Ayant tenté sa chance au Liberia, la jeune femme a travaillé dans un laboratoire où des chimpanzés servaient de cobayes à des expériences sur le virus de l'hépatite, pour le compte de sociétés pharmaceutiques américaines. Très vite, elle a rencontré puis épousé le Dr Woodrow Sundiata, bureaucrate local appartenant à une tribu puissante et promis à une brillante carrière politique. Quelques années plus tard, elle est brusquement rentrée en Amérique, laissant là leurs trois enfants, fuyant la guerre civile qui enflammait le pays. Au moment où commence ce livre, Hannah quitte sa ferme "écologique" des Adirondacks, car ce passé sans épilogue la pousse à retourner en Afrique... Évocation passionnante d'une turbulente période de l'histoire des Etats-Unis comme du destin d'un pays méconnu, le Liberia, le roman de Russell Banks tire sa force exceptionnelle de la complexité de son héroïne, et d'un bouleversant affrontement entre histoire et fiction. Petite enfant gâtée de l'Amérique rattrapée par la mauvaise conscience en même temps qu'universelle incarnation de toute quête d'identité en ses tours et détours, mensonges et aveux, erreurs et repentirs, Hannah Musgrave est sans doute l'une des créations romanesques les plus fascinantes du grand écrivain américain.
A comprehensive survey of the work of one of America's best-known photographers. Renowned for his melancholic, dramatic and painterly images of small-town America, Gregory Crewdson has evolved over a nearly thirty-year career into one of the world's most acclaimed photographers.
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 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 he considered direct orders from God, helping spark the Civil War. A deeply researched but fictionalized Owen narrates this remarkably realistic and ambitious novel by the already distinguished author of The Sweet Hereafter . Owen is an atheist, but he is as haunted and dominated by his father, John Brown, as John was haunted by an angry God who demanded human sacrifice to stop the abomination of slavery. Cloudsplitter takes you along on John Brown's journey -- as period-perfect as that of the Civil War deserter in Cold Mountain -- from Brown's cabin facing the great Adirondack mountain (called "the Cloudsplitter" by the Indians) amid an abolitionist settlement the blacks there call "Timbuctoo," to the various perilous stops of the Underground Railroad spiriting slaves out of the South, and finally to the killings in Bloody Kansas and the Harpers Ferry revolt. We meet some great names -- Frederick Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and a (fictional) lover of Nathaniel Hawthorne -- but the vast book keeps a tight focus on the aged Owen's obsessive recollections of his pa's crusade and the emotional shackles John clamped on his own family. Banks, a white author, has tackled the topic of race as impressively as Toni Morrison in novels such as Continental Drift . What makes Cloudsplitter a departure for him is its style and scope. He is noted as an exceptionally thorough chronicler of America today in rigorously detailed realist fiction (he championed Snow Falling on Cedars ). Banks spent half a decade researching Cloudsplitter , and he renounces the conventional magic of his poetical prose style for a voice steeped in the King James Bible and the stately cadences of 19th-century political rhetoric. The tone is closer to Ken Burns's tragic, elegiac The Civil War than to the recent crazy-quilt modernist novel about John Brown, Raising Holy Hell . A fan of Banks's more cut-to-the-chase, Hollywood-hot modern style may get impatient, but such readers can turn to, say, Gore Vidal's recently reissued Lincoln , which peeks into the Great Emancipator's head with a modern's cynical wit. Banks's narrator is poetical and witty at times -- Owen notes, "The outrage felt by whites [over slavery] was mostly spent on stoking their own righteousness and warming themselves before its fire." Yet in the main, Banks writes in the "elaborately plainspoken" manner of the Browns, restricting himself to a sober style dictated by the historical subject. Besides, John Brown's head resembles the stone tablets of Moses. You do not penetrate him, and you can't declare him mad or sane, good or evil. You read, struggling to locate the words emanating from some strange place between history, heaven, and hell.
This collection features new stories that explore the intricate dynamics of modern American families, showcasing Russell Banks' keen insight and storytelling prowess. Known for his acclaimed works, Banks delves into the emotional landscapes and challenges faced by families today, offering a poignant and thought-provoking examination of relationships and identity. Each narrative reveals the complexities of familial bonds, making this a compelling read for those interested in contemporary life and human connections.
Originally published by Harper in 1985 to great acclaim, "Continental Drift" is an American masterpiece about innocence and evil by one of the most important novelists writing today.
"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 short fiction, revised especially for this volume and highlighted by the inclusion of nine new stories that are among the finest he has ever written. As is characteristic of all of Bank's works, these stories resonate with irony and compassion, honesty and insight, extending into the vast territory of the heart and the world, from working-class New England to Florida and the Caribbean and Africa. Broad in scope and rich in imagination, The Angel on the Roof affirms Russell Banks's place as one of the masters of American storytelling.
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.
