Review:
"Old-fashioned short fiction: honest, probing and moving."--Kirkus Reviews
"[O]ne of the best books I've read in years"--Real Simple magazine
"While these exquisitely crafted stories are highly personal, they are also permeated by a sense of sadness about the death of the American dream, as the country struggles, out of work and seemingly out of hope."--Publishers Weekly
A resounding collection by an essential American writer.--Booklist
."..an exceptionally well-written, engaging, unified collection"--New York Journal of Books
."..Banks's short fiction is relentlessly realistic, never cynical, and always attentive to the human condition."--Shelf Awareness
"These characters are all broken in wonderfully literary ways ('When a terrible thing happens, and it's your own damn fault, there's no closure, he thought. Whatever happened, you live with it.') but Banks is primarily concerned with telling a good story, and the pages fly by."--Daily Beast
"It's a gift to experience such expertly evoked pathos, to see how Banks meticulously picks out and exposes the strands of his characters' muddled and suppressed feelings."--Boston Globe
"Mr. Banks uses his sturdy gifts as a writer -- his plain-spoken language, his sympathy for the downtrodden and depressed, his eye for detail (those unstrapped shoes, flipped off Ellen's feet) -- to give us visceral portraits of people trying to make sense of the past and the present."--New York Times
"[T]he writing rings with the weight of decisions made in constrained circumstances, decisions that become more moving because of how common they are... There's a reflective quality, a sense of choices made, of consequence, in which redemption and resignation may be two sides of the same coin."--Los Angeles Times
Book Description:
The first story collection in a decade from the great Russell Banks
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