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.

29-year-old Vanessa Cole is a wild, stunningly beautiful heiress, scandalously linked to any number of rich and famous men. But at her parents' country

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"In 1971, a property speculator named Harley Mann begins recording his life story onto a reel-to-reel machine. Reflecting on his childhood in the early 20th century, Harley recounts that after his father's sudden death, his family migrated down to Florida-mere miles away from what would become Disney World-to join a community of Shakers. Led by Elder John, a generous man with a mysterious past, the colony devoted itself to labor, faith, and charity,...

Canadian American leftist documentary filmmaker Leonard Fife was one of thousands of draft evaders and deserters who fled to Canada to avoid serving in Vietnam. Now in his late seventies and dying of cancer in Montreal, Fife has agreed to a final interview in which he is determined to bare all his secrets at last, to demythologize his mythologized life. The interview is filmed by his acolyte and ex-star student, Malcolm MacLeod, in the presence of...

From a hermit's shack on an isolated California mountaintop, Owen Brown, the only surviving son of abolitionist John Brown, reminisces over his role in his father's bloody crusade -- from maintaining the Underground Railroad in upstate New York to battling pro-slavery settlers in Kansas to the fateful raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry. Massive in scope and brimming with love, hatred, revenge, and unbridled ego, Cloudsplitter is a dazzling...

This is a 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 this 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...

After his ill-fated pursuit of the American dream, Bob Dubois finds employment on a fishing boat off the Florida Keys where he becomes involved in a plot to smuggle two Haitians into Florida.

Originating in the folktale and with an occasional infusion of gothic horror or fantasy, A. E. Coppard's stories still feel fresh and surprising today. Coppard came to the short story later in life but left an indelible mark on it. Staunch in his belief that the short story was a distinctive form with little relation to the novel, he wove his tales out of the substance of life in the English countryside, with its memorable and distinctive characters....

Cycle of interrelated stories that sympathetically view lonely and frustrated individuals in a midwestern town.