A complete lesson plan by BookRags. This lesson plan is sold separately and is not included with any subscription or study pack.

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 experimented with some postmodern techniques and has confronted...

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 Ford, Andre Dubus, and perhaps Richard Bausch and call th...

"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 American writer Russell Banks. The author of over a d...

"IT WAS an accident, that's all. Accidents happen." The speaker is a teenager left crippled after a school bus careers down an embankment to slide into-a water-filled pit in a small town in upstate New York. She is right; it really was an...

Off for the Sweet Hereafter by T. R. Pearson (Linden Press/Simon & Schuster, 283 pp., $17.95) "HE'S GOT a good ear': Few accolades are more likely to turn a writer's head. But what if the ear on that head has been...

When Jane Campion was honored onstage at the Cannes Film Festival with about 30 other major directors Sunday, she was the lone woman of the bunch. And she's still not used to how strange that feels.The New Zealander is the only woman filmmaker to have...

Becoming big in Hollywood has never been Sarah Polley's agenda. It shows in her acting choices, almost exclusively small, intimate tales made far outside the American studio system.And it shows in the actress' directing debut with "Away From Her," a mature, thoughtful but downbeat drama...

In the following essay, Pearson compares the commercial and critical success of The Sweet Hereafter to Egoyan's background as an independent screenwriter and director.

In the following review, Turner argues that Egoyan's past works inform The Sweet Hereafter and notes ways in which the film deviates from his earlier works.

In the following review, Rayns argues that Egoyan's failure to sustain a sense of community in The Sweet Hereafter detracts from the film's overall impact.

An analysis of how the book written by Russel Banks show how the book does not develop the character of Dolores Driscoll as well as the movie of the same title by Atom Egoyan.

A comparison of Russell Banks' story The Sweet Hereafter and Robert Browning's poem "The Pied Piper of Hamelin." Both stories parallel one another in their descriptions of the pain effects of disaster on a small town, and Banks used the extended meaning in Browning's tale to write his story.

A summary of the role of Mitchell Stephens in Russell Banks' book The Sweet Hereafter, which tells the story of a community coping with a town's loss following a fatal school bus accident. At first Stephens portrayed as a fast-talking, ambulance-chasing lawyer from New York City as he pursues the case following the accident; but as the tale progresses, Stephens' internal motives come to the fore.