Talking Volumes Audio Live Fitzgerald Theater appearance: October 27, 2004 Midmorning interview with Russell Banks: October 8, 2004 Photos "The Darling" book cover More from MPR Live appearance ticket information Resources Musicians Rass Kwame and Anance Your Voice News Forum: Discuss this book in the MPR Books Forum

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"The Darling" by Russell Banks
October 27, 2004

"The Darling" by Russell Banks (Courtesy HarperCollins)

St. Paul, Minn. — "The Darling" was the October 2004 selection for Talking Volumes, the joint book club of Minnesota Public Radio, The Star Tribune, and The Loft Literary Center. On October 27, author Russell Banks will discuss the book in person with Kerri Miller and the Talking Volumes audience at the Fitzgerald Theater.

Live music at the Fitzgerald Theater event:

Muscians Rass Kwame and Anance will perform at the Talking Volumes event on Oct. 27. The musicians are from Ghana, where many Liberian refugees live. They will play two Liberian songs.

From the publisher:

Set in Liberia and the United States during the years 1975-91, "The Darling" is Hannah Musgrave's story, told emotionally and convincingly years later by Hannah herself. A political radical and member of the Weather Underground, Hannah has fled America to West Africa, where she and her Liberian husband, a minister in President Doe's government, become friends and colleagues of Charles Taylor, the notorious warlord and now ex-president of Liberia. When Taylor leaves for the U.S. in an effort to escape embezzlement charges, he's immediately placed in prison. And it is Hannah who eventually organizes and participates in his escape.

Years later, when Taylor returns to Liberia to foment a bloody rebellion, Hannah's family is caught up in the civil war when her teenaged sons join the rebel movement. Ultimately, she is forced to make a heart-rending choice: abandon her family to its fate or stay and go down with them.

Fans of Russell Banks will be rewarded with his incisive eye for character, his ability to deliver a relentless and engaging narrative - always in the service of his inimitable style. This political/historical thriller - reminiscent of Greene and Conrad - explodes the genre by raising serious philosophical questions about terrorism, political violence and the clash of races and cultures.

Biography of Russell Banks, from the publisher:

Russell Banks was raised in New Hampshire and eastern Massachusetts. The eldest of four children, he grew up in a working-class environment, which has played a major role in his writing.

Mr. Banks (who was the first in his family to go to college) attended Colgate University for less than a semester, and later graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Before he could support himself as a writer, he tried his hand at plumbing, and as a shoe salesman and window trimmer. More recently, he has taught at a number of colleges and universities, including Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence, University of New Hampshire, New England College, New York University and Princeton University.

A prolific writer of fiction, his titles include Searching for Survivors, Family Life, Hamilton Stark, The New World, The Book of Jamaica, Trailerpark, The Relation of My Imprisonment, Continental Drift, Success Stories, Affliction, The Sweet Hereafter, Rule of the Bone, Cloudsplitter, and The Angel On The Roof, a collection of short stories. He has also contributed poems, stories and essays to The Boston Globe Magazine, Vanity Fair, The New York Times Book Review, Esquire, Harper's, and many other publications.

His works have been widely translated and published in Europe and Asia. Two of his novels have been adapted for feature-length films, The Sweet Hereafter (directed by Atom Goyan, winner of the Grand Prix and International Critics Prize at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival) and Affliction (directed by Paul Schrader, starring Nick Nolte, Willem Dafoe, Sissy Spacek, and James Coburn). He is the screenwriter of a film adaptation of Continental Drift.

Mr. Banks has won numerous awards and prizes for his work, among them a Guggenheim Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships, Ingram Merrill Award, The St. Lawrence Award for Short Fiction, O. Henry and Best American Short Story Award, The John Dos Passos Award, and the Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Continental Drift and Cloudsplitter were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in 1986 and 1998 respectively. Affliction was short listed for both the PEN/Faulkner Fiction Prize and the Irish International Prize.

He has lived in a variety of places, from New England to Jamaica, which have contributed to the richness of his writing. He is currently living in upstate New York. Russell Banks is married to the poet Chase Twichell, and is the father of four grown daughters.

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