Russell Banks
Russell Banks
Russell Banksis an American writer of fiction and poetry. As a novelist, Banks is best known for his "detailed accounts of domestic strife and the daily struggles of ordinary often-marginalized characters". His stories usually revolve around his own childhood experiences, and often reflect "moral themes and personal relationships"...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth28 March 1940
CountryUnited States of America
kids men boys
Boys like it when you talk to them as if they were grown men—at least he always did when he was a kid—because they pretend that’s what they are anyhow, grown-up men, and they do it for their entire lives.
men together fields
Like Neanderthals, men prefer to hunt alone or, if in a pack, at the head of it. Women, whether in the field or in a campfire, are collaborative, and when they hunt...they work together.
running men white
First of all it's usually women who run these higher primate sanctuaries, rarely men. They are white. They come from privileged backgrounds. They are educated.
frustration men sight
When an old man and a young man work together, it can make an ugly sight or a pretty one, depending on who's in charge. If the young man's in charge or won't let the old man take over, the young man's brute strength becomes destructive and inefficient, and the old man's intelligence, out of frustration, grows cruel and inefficient. Sometimes the old man forgets that he is old and tries to compete with the young man's strength, and then it's a sad sight. Or the young man forgets that he is young and argues with the old man about how to do the work, and that's a sad sight, too.
american-author book good prizes work writer
The prizes have some credibility, of course. And they do good work for the writer and for the publisher, by winnowing one book out of the pack.
funny
That was the funny part of the reading.
american-author career earlier influenced parts writers
I think probably in the earlier parts of my career I was influenced by writers such as Hawthorne and Melville - the American classics.
american-author grows invented
I don't want it to be all that self-conscious or artificial, but it really grows out of my having invented myself as a listener so that I could hear her voice.
dividing issues
So the same cultural and political issues that divided us in 1968 are still dividing us.
american-author graduate prefer princeton students taught teaching
I taught at Princeton and it was undergraduate and I much prefer teaching undergraduates to graduate students in writing programs.
american-author darkness demanding energy far full lucky stories
So far I've been very lucky in that stories have come to me like a thunderstorm, unexpected, full of darkness and energy demanding all my attention.
american-author hard produce understood work
And of course, it's hard to produce a work at the end of those years of solitude, which may or may not be understood or appreciated.
flip lights
All you could do was flip switches and make lights blink.
storytelling allegiance majors
My major allegiance has been to storytelling, not to history.