Cloudsplitter

Russell Banks

Paperback

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Nominee:PEN/Faulkner Award -Fiction (1999)

This brilliant recounting of the events surrounding John Brown's legendary raid on the armory at Harpers Ferry is a masterpiece of modern American storytelling that will be remembered as the crowning achievement of Russell Banks' celebrated career. Russell Banks' gift for creating compelling stories populated by gritty and startlingly realcharacters has resulted in such acclaimed masterworks as "Continental Drift," "The Sweet Hereafter" and his most recent bestseller, "Rule of the Bone." Now Banks takes on one of American history's most misunderstood figures, John Brown, whose October 1859 raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, crossed the line from civil protest to armed struggle, prefiguring the greatest conflagration in this country's history. Narrated by the enigmatic abolitionist's son Owen, the novel dazzlingly recreates the fractured political and social landscape of pre-Civil War America, when slavery and talk of secession were tearing the country apart. But "Cloudsplitter" is about much more than one man's quest for political change and social justice. It is a moving and powerfully told story of fathers and sons, of racial conflict and division, as well as an intimate portrait of 19th-century family life. Rich in incident and exquisite detail, "Cloudsplitter" is the novel that will elevate Russell Banks to the highest rank of 20th-century American authors.

Book Details

Publisher: Ecco Press
Publish Date: Jan 27th, 1999
Pages: 768
Language: English
Edition: undefined - undefined
Dimensions: 8.03in - 5.37in - 1.81in - 1.25lb
EAN: 9780060930868
Categories: • Literary• Historical - 19th Century - American Civil War Era• World Literature - American - 20th Century

About the Author

Banks, Russell: -

Russell Banks, twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, was one of America's most prestigious fiction writers, a past 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 he received numerous prizes and awards, including the Common Wealth Award for Literature. He died in January 2023 at the age of eighty-two.

Praise for this book

"It is surely his best novel, a furious, sprawling drama that commands attention like thunder heard from just over the horizon." -- Time

"A huge and thunderously good book." -- Chicago Tribune

"Deeply affecting...Like the best novels of Nadine Gordimer, it makes us appreciate the dynamic between the personal and the political, the public and the private, and the costs and causes of radical belief." -- New York Times

"Russell Banks's remarkable Cloudsplitter brings Brown back to life, not to teach history, but as the narrator of a morally questioning novel about fathers and sons and fanaticism and how madness is measured when the sane have fled." -- USA Today

"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

"Of the many writers working in the great tradition today, one of the best is Russell Banks." -- New York Times Book Review

"Russell Banks is a writer of extraordinary power." -- Boston Globe

"Russell Banks's work presents without falsehood and with a tough affection the uncompromising moral voice of our time. You find the craziness of false dreams, the political inequalities, and somehow the sliver of redemption. I trust his portrait of America more than any other--the burden of it, the need for it, the hell of it." -- Michael Ondaatje