Russell Banks

With America ever under global scrutiny, Russell Banks contemplates the questions of our origins, values, heroes, conflicts, and contradictions. He writes with conversational ease and emotional insight, drawing on contemporary politics, literature, film, and his knowledge of American history.

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. Wade comes to loom in one's mind as a blue-collar American Everyman afflicted by the dark secret of the macho tradition.

Having fled to West Africa in the late 1970s for her work as a political radical, Hannah Musgrave befriends notorious former Liberian president Charles Taylor, who years later leads a rebellion that threatens Hannah's family.

A collection of twelve short works that portrays contemporary American family life visits morally complex themes in a fractured nation of inhabitants searching for connection and understanding.

"Three interlocking stories focusing on the residents of a town called Sam Dent, the undercurrent of the Trump movement in America, and a series of local tragedies"-- A husband sells property to a mysterious, temperamental stranger, and is hounded on social media when he publicly questions the man's character. A couple grows concerned when an enigmatic family moves next door, and the children start sneaking over to beg for help. Two dangerous criminals...

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...