Russell Banks (The Sweet Hereafter, Affliction) started out as a poet, and nowhere is this more evident than in his 37 years' worth of exquisite short stories, collected here in one hefty volume for the first time. In a mournfully lyrical phrase, he can evoke his characteristic landscape, the icy northeastern U.S.: "The air was crystalline, almost absent. The fields lay like aged plates of bone--dry, scoured by the cold until barren of possibility, incapable even of decomposition." Though his stories venture to Jamaica and Africa, Banks keeps coming back to New Hampshire and the themes of divorce, poverty, violence, and what he calls "the old father-and-son thing." He's not slumming in his trailer-park tales: his own drunken prole father beat him brutally, and Banks knows how grief and guilt shatter and unite families and small towns.

Characters often crop up in more than one story, giving the setting novelistic depth, drawing us into each life. In "Queen for a Day," we meet the young children of the Painter clan of New Hampshire as their dad is abandoning their mom, who then loses her job. "They run to her and wrap her in their arms... the three of them wind around each other like snakes moving in and out of one another's coils." In "Firewood," Painter's grown children rebuff his offer of fuel for their hearth, repaying his indifference, and Banks gives us a bad-guy's-eye view of their shared loneliness. In "The Fisherman," a $50,000 lottery is won by an old ice fisherman who stashes it in a cigar box, eliciting character-revealing reactions from the trailer-park denizens. "Dis Bwoy, Him Gwan" further reveals why the local pothead Bruce Severance so urgently needs the fisherman's money. The stories resonate and illuminate each other, the dialogue is pitch-perfect, and the collection has the cohesiveness of a 500-page novel. Banks's prose has the stark grace of classical tragedy. He's a poet after all. --Tim Appelo


From Publishers Weekly
Two-thirds of the 32 stories in this magnificent collection have appeared before, in the four volumes of short fiction Banks has published over the past 25 years; all, including nine new ones, were chosen by the author as representative of work that "did not on rereading make me cringe." Banks is a born short story writer and confesses he loves the form; in many of the entries here, the impact is all the more powerful for the intense concentration he brings to bear on the desperate lives he so often chooses to chronicle. The best of these tales, many of them set in the sad New Hampshire trailer park that was the basis for an entire collection of linked tales, tell of the anguish of parents and children moving apart, of husbands and wives and lovers facing the grim certainty that nothing in their relationships is going to change or improve. "The Burden," about a man's despairing break with his no-good son; "Quality Time," about a daughter realizing she has finally moved away from her father; "Firewood," about a couple trapped by ruined expectations; and "Queen for a Day," about a small boy's efforts to cheer up his failing mother, are almost unbearably poignant, unflinching glimpses into the dark recesses of life, illuminated by Banks's unfailing compassion and steady eye and ear. These stories, like his wintry northern landscapes, are deeply lived in. Yet Banks can be equally evocative of exotic corners of the world, as in "Djinn" and "The Fish," mysterious fables set in Africa and India. Only in such flights as "Indisposed," an imagining of William Hogarth's wife, or "With Che in New Hampshire," in which he mixes myth and actuality, does Banks seem on more tentative ground. But most of the stories strike home swiftly and surely, reminding a reader again and again of the amplitude of the form in the hands of a master. (June) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Banks originally wanted to be a poet but felt he lacked the Muse. Yet poetic imagery informs the novels for which he is best known as well as the short stories in this collection. Presented here are 31 short fictions; 22 have been in previous collections, and nine are recent and uncollected. All of the earlier stories have been revised, and Banks says sagely of his means of selection, "I chose to include only those that did not on rereading make me cringe with embarrassment." The collection is permeated by a wise sadness, and the brilliant use of language stands out against the hard-living, hard-drinking underclass that generally populates these stories, as it does the novels. Take the most recent, "Lobster Night," set in a roughish upstate New York roadhouse trying to upscale itself a little, where "stories" from the characters (being struck by lightning, a bear attack) set a thematic backdrop for a chain of death-related events that leads to a homicide. A lot goes on in a few pages in all the stories here; this is a master writer at his best. Very highly recommended.-DRobert E. Brown, Onondaga Cty. P.L., Syracuse, NY Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, A.O. Scott
For all its harshness, The Angel on the Roof is studded with surprising, hard-won acts of tenderness and decency, which feel more like operations of earthly grace than projections of authorial sentiment.


The New York Times, Janet Maslin
A beautifully lucid, frequently wrenching collection ... What elevates these stories far above their tacitly heartbreaking events are the vast reserves of compassion and wisdom that Mr. Banks brings to framing tragedy.


From Booklist
Banks, author of such memorable novels as Rule of the Bone (1995) and Cloudsplitter (1998), is not particularly well known as a short-story writer, but this omnibus collection of his stories displays a formidable talent in the shorter form. Banks creates imaginative but easily accessible plots in such stories as "Djinn," in which a businessman in Africa encounters a surrealistic world, and "The Fish," a parable about how peoples' pilgrimages to visit a fish with purported miraculous powers are seen by the local government (in an unnamed but obviously repressive country) as political opposition. Banks' stories will appeal to a variety of readers, even those not typically comfortable with short stories. His uncomplicated, direct prose style poses no threat to understanding, and even the stories with multiple meanings--the fish parable, for example--are readily accessible. Brad Hooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

FROM THE PUBLISHER

After nine critically acclaimed novels, Russell Banks has firmly established himself as one of the great American novelists. But throughout his career Banks has also been a master of the short form, publishing four story collections, winning O. Henry and Best American Short Story Awards and other prizes, and contributing stories to such publications as Esquire, New American Review, Antaeus, Mississippi Review, and Partisian Review. Now, with The Angel on the Roof, Banks offers readers an astonighsing collection of thirty years of his short fiction. As is characteristic of all Banks's works, these stories resonate with irony and compassion, honsty and insight, extending into the vast territory of the heart and world, from working-class New England to Florida and the Caribbean and Africa. Along with nine new stories that are among the finest fiction he has ever written, Banks has selected the best pieces from his previous collections and revised them especially for this volume. Broad in scope and rich in imagination, The Angel on the Roof is a true representation of the breadth of Russell Bank's work and affirms his place on one of the masters of American storytelling.

FROM THE CRITICS

Newsday

His new book, The Angel on the Roof, includes nine new stories and twenty-two from previous collections. At age sixty, Banks seems to be going from strength to strength. The new ones are among his best. . . .Unfathomable, grangrenous, necessary, the urge to create continues to push Russell banks to new levels of excellence,

Nation

His prose has the precise force of a steady, measured outrage...He writes with a more merciless exactitude than Dreiser ever had, and with greater and more self-conscious skill.

Village Voice

Banks's stories, openly embracing perplexity and edging toward wisdom, deliver us from banality.

Boston Globe

Russell Banks is a writer of extraordinary power.

New York Post

This collection of short stories displays the same strong sense of character and prose style that have distinguished his novels.Read all 12 "From The Critics" >

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

Russell Banks's work presents without falsehood and with a tough affection the uncompromising moral voice of our time. You find the craziness of false dreams, the political inequalities, and somehow the sliver of redemption. I trust his portrait of America more than any othr-the burden of it, the need for it, the hell of it. — Michael Ondaatje