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A Conversation with Russell Banks and Donald Ray Pollock

Presented by Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library at Free Library of Philadelphia - Parkway Central Library

October 11, 2011

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“[A] writer we can actually learn from, whose books help and urge us to change,” (The Village Voice), Russell Banks is a Pulitzer and PEN/Faulkner finalist, and the author of numerous novels, including The Sweet Hereafter and Affliction, which were adapted into critically acclaimed films. His novels and short story collections have won him numerous honors, including a St. Lawrence Prize for fiction; in 2011, the French Minister of Culture awarded Banks the rank of Officier des Arts et Lettres. He writes with intense empathy and a gentle sense of humor, as his characters face misadventures and outright tragedies with resilience and strength. In Lost Memory of Skin, Banks examines the repercussions of living in a zero-tolerance society through the eyes of a morally complex young man.

Here’s what the critics have to say about Donald Ray Pollock’s stories: “Startling, bleak, uncompromising, and funny… This is as raw as American fiction gets. It’s is an unforgettable experience.” (San Francisco Chronicle); “Knockemstiff is a powerful, remarkable, exceptional book that is very hard to read… dark, twisted, stuffed like the back seat of an old car with stained clothing, ugly sex, and too many drugs” (Los Angeles Times). Interested yet? After receiving the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for being an “exceptionally talented fiction writer whose debut work represents distinguished literary achievement and suggests great promise,” Pollock set about writing his first novel, The Devil All the Time—a grim, exquisite and compulsively readable story about an orphan, a preacher, and a couple of serial killers that has drawn comparison to the writings of Cormac McCarthy and Flannery O’Connor.