The Darling

“The way I feel about every book is this: you don’t finish it, you abandon it. All of my books have in some sense failed, otherwise I wouldn’t write another one. If I wrote the perfect book, I wouldn’t have to write again, and I wouldn’t want to. That’s not true for everyone, but it’s true for me. I could walk away then. But so far I haven’t managed to do it.” –Russell BanksRussell Banks’ books include Searching for Survivors, Family Life, Hamilton Stark, The New World, 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 Vanity Fair, The New York Times Book Review, Esquire, Harper’s, and many other publications.Mr. Banks was raised in New Hampshire and eastern Massachusetts and is the eldest of four children. He grew up in a working-class environment – a major influence on his writing – and was the first member of his family to go to college. After graduating Phi Beta Kappa from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he worked as a plumber, shoe salesman and window cleaner. More recently he has taught in the writing programs at Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence College, the University of Alabama, New England College, New York University and Princeton University.Acclaimed as “the most important living white American male on the official literary map” by The Village Voice, Banks has been praised for his empathy, his compassion for his characters, and his attempts to grapple with the moral ambiguities of contemporary life. He has also been repeatedly recognized for his ability to evoke the texture of ordinary American lives and the humanity he brings to what are often dark and brutal tales of poverty, violence, hard living and domestic abuse.Mr. Banks has received several prizes and awards for his work, including 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 Prize, 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.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 Egoyan, 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.Russell Banks lives in upstate New York. He is married to the poet Chase Twichell, and is the father of four grown daughters.From the Hardcover edition.