"Banks' ecological warnings might strike even the most fervent environmentalist as rather apocalyptic, yet in the best of these pieces, his clarity of vision and muscular prose are as transporting as a mountain ascent."
Acclaimed fiction writer Banks (A Permanent Member of the Family, 2013, etc.) turns an able hand to nonfiction in this expansive, elegiac reflection on the pleasures and deceptions of travel.
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"Old-fashioned short fiction: honest, probing and moving."
One of America's great novelists (Lost Memory of Skin, 2011, etc.) also writes excellent stories, as his sixth collection reminds readers.
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"Intelligent, passionate and powerful, but very stark indeed."
Banks (The Reserve, 2008, etc.) once again explores the plight of the dispossessed, taking a big risk this time by making his protagonist a convicted sex offender.
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"Banks is one of America's finest novelists, but this oddly distanced work lacks the passionate personal engagement of a masterpiece like Continental Drift (1985) or the bracing historical revisionism of Cloudsplitter (1998)."
A left-wing artist tangles with a troubled heiress in this characteristically somber, class-conscious novel from Banks (The Darling, 2004, etc.).
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"Banks never makes it easy, but this is worth reading as a warning to anyone not chary of the children of privilege."
The Pulitzer-nominated author of Cloudsplitter (1998), among others, looks unsparingly at the bitter life of a 1960s revolutionary.
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"One of our best and most ambitious novelists reminds us with this collection just how good his short fiction can be."
Like Banks's many fine novels (Cloudsplitter, 1997, etc.), these short works are generally realistic in style and subject matter, with an occasional fable-inflected exception like "The Fish."
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"Once again, sadly, Banks's reach has exceeded his grasp. ($125,000 ad/promo; author tour)"
An inordinately ambitious portrayal of the life and mission of abolitionist John Brown, from the veteran novelist whose previous fictional forays into American history include The New World (1978) and The Relation of My Imprisonment (not reviewed).
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"As has often been the case with Banks: ambitious voyaging, but, in spite of its distances, mainly on the surface. (First printing of 100,000; $150,000 ad/promo; author tour)"
Banks follows The Sweet Hereafter (1991) with this in-the- hero's-own-words tale of an upstate New York teenager who has trouble aplenty with parents, drugs, and desperados.
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"Melodrama and populist realism in a Banksian mix that often rings tinny but that's easy reading and may have popular appeal."
Banks returns to the provincial reaches of upper New York State (Affliction, 1989), this time to see how a community tragedy touches the lives of ordinary people.
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