"No modern author writes more perceptively about ordinary men's stumbling quest for the American grail of material comfort and self-respect," remarked Salon.com contributor Cynthia Joyce regarding the...
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Russell Banks resists categories; yet as one looks at the American short fiction written in the last quarter of the twentieth century, the temptation is to group Banks with Raymond Carver, Richard For...
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Russell Banks has been publishing innovative fiction for more than twenty-five years, gaining praise from critics for his short stories and novels. Although he is primarily a realist, he has experimen...
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In the following review, Binding praises Banks's insight and sense of mercy in the stories collected in The Angel on the Roof, comparing Banks to Raymond Carver.
“It's true of tra...
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In the following excerpt, Snodgrass commends Banks's powerful and “supple” prose in The Angel on the Roof, asserting that Banks crafts “memorable stories out of ordinary li...
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In the following essay, Leckie investigates how the narrative minimalism of Banks's short story “Black Man and White Woman in Dark Green Rowboat” functions to explore issues of cu...
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In the following review, Hulbert finds parallels between Banks's protagonist, Chappie, in Rule of the Bone and the iconic fictional characters of Huck Finn and Holden Caulfield.
Russell Banks n...
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In the following review, Yardley contends that Trailerpark “is an odd, quirky book that offers satisfactions different from those provided by the conventional, or even unconventional, novel.&#x...
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In the following excerpt, Werner explores the influence of James Joyce's narrative technique on Banks's Searching for Survivors.
Dublin(er)'s Joyce: Ernest Gaines, Flannery O�...
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In the following review, Eder provides a positive assessment of Success Stories.
Quite steadily, and often powerfully, Russell Banks has been devising fictional varieties of the “this is poison...
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In the following mixed assessment of Success Stories, Pfeil asserts that Banks “has put in enough time in working-class America to have an exact sense of what its dreams and betrayals feel like...
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In the following essay, Fonseca offers a mixed review of Success Stories.
Russell Banks's novel Continental Drift, published in the UK last year (TLS, October 25, 1985), traces the fate of two ...
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In the following essay, Leckie analyzes Banks's narrative technique in “Black Man and White Woman in Dark Green Rowboat.”
If much of contemporary literary theory emphasizes the cu...
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In the following essay, Niemi categorizes the stories comprising Searching for Survivors and surveys the major themes of the collection.
Nobody had enough imagination.
—John Barth, “Los...
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Russell Banks
Russell Banks
