A mature and masterful work of contemporary fiction from a great American writer.
One of America's most prestigious fiction writers, Russell Banks is president of the International Parliament of Writers and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His work has been translated into twenty languages and has received numerous international prizes and awards. He lives in upstate New York.
The opening pages of Lost Memory of Skin are the most electrifying
I've read in a while
*Sunday Times*
Banks is one of the United States' bravest, most daring writers
*Irish Times*
Russell Banks tackles hard subjects with verve and courage, and
Lost Memory of Skin takes us into the dark side of the dark side.
Five stars.
*Margaret Atwood, New York Times bestselling author*
The uncompromising moral voice of our time
*Michael Ondaatje*
If you've never read Russell Banks it's time you acquired the
habit
*Elmore Leonard*
Of the many writers working in the great tradition today, one of
the best is Russell Banks.
*Jonathan Franzen*
We live in perilous, creepy times. We toy recklessly with brand-new
capacities for ruination. We bring the most human impulses to the
least human means of expressing them, and we may not see the damage
we do until it becomes irrevocable. Mr. Banks, whose great works
resonate with such heart and soul, brings his full narrative powers
to bear on illuminating this still largely unexplored new
terrain
*New York Times*
Banks is one of those precious writers like Twain or Salinger who
creates a voice so wonderfully real that the experience of reading
them is like a conversation with an old friend
*Sunday Times*
Like our living literary giants Toni Morrison and Thomas Pynchon,
Russell Banks is a great writer wrestling with the hidden secrets
and explosive realities of this country
*Cornel West*
I trust his portrait of America more than any other-the burden of
it, the need for it, the hell of it.
*Michael Ondaatje*
Russell Banks's new novel is as haunting as its title. Lost Memory
of Skin plumbs the shadowy sub-basement of American society, circa
right now. This is Banks with all his stars out: the spring-loaded
sentence, the searing moral clarity, the knowing heart. Lost Memory
of Skin shows a living master at the height of his powers. It is a
gripping and important book.
*Jennifer Haigh, author of 2004 PEN/Hemingway Award winner Mrs.
Kimble and New York Times bestseller and 2006 PEN/L.L. Winship
Award winner Baker Towers*
Russell Banks is a writer of extraordinary power.
*Boston Globe*
A canonical book for our time
*New York Times*
Always, Banks writes with trembling knowledge, conviction, and
authenticity.
*Chicago Tribune*
Russell Banks knows everything worth knowing...and much, much
more.
*Washington Post Book World*
Wrenching, panoramic ... suspenseful
*New York Times*
Banks is too nuanced a writer to make his central character simply
a study in victimhood, and the Kid isn't one for self-pity, which
would smack of weakness. Yet there is more than a touch of
"j'accuse" about the book. It points its finger at a society that
has mistaken the easy gratification of the virtual world with
reality, skin flicks for actual skin ... The novel sings brightest
when it gives itself up to his guileless stream of consciousness,
and is at its most persuasive and tender as it charts his growing
self-awareness
*Financial Times*
Banks is one of the United States' bravest, most daring writers ...
As well as being courageous, Banks is moralistic, an old style
polemicist unafraid of portraying technology as a serpent in the
garden ... The strength opf the book, as of Banks the writer, is an
enduring belief in the grey area. Very little about this novel is
black and white ... Banks can be angry and is often righteous, and
there are elements of both in this novel. But his humanity shines
through ... Yet again Russell Banks, as committed a commentator as
Don DeLillo, looks to - and at - his country in a novel that is
uncompromising on the subject of compromise. This is a tough book,
raising uncomfortable issues. Banks is dogged and determined, a
visionary realist who believes in testing fiction - and his
readers. Here is an unsettling narrative that will leave one queasy
and sheepish on the question of right and wrong and good and evil.
It also testifies to the validity of story as both entertainment
and polemic. There may, perhaps, be better novels, but few are as
important or as cautionary
*Irish Times*
A superb prose-stylist
*Independent*
Russell Banks is the master of moral ambiguity
*Australian Financial Review*
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