In the sweet hereafter, Russell Banks tells a story that begins with a school bus accident. Using four different narrators, banks creates a small-town morality play that addresses one of life's most agonizing questions: when the worst thing happens, who do you blame? .

Affliction

A well-digger and policeman in a bleak New Hampshire town, he is a former high-school star gone to beer fat, a loner with a mean streak. Told by his articulate, equally scarred younger brother, Wade's story becomes as spellbinding and inexorable as a fuse burning its way to the dynamite. It is a mark of russell banks' artistry and understanding that Wade comes to loom in one's mind as a blue-collar American Everyman afflicted by the dark secret of the macho tradition.

. Wade whitehouse is an improbable protagonist for a tragedy.

Continental Drift P.S.

Now available for the first time in e-book format, and a gripping, a powerful literary classic from one of contemporary fiction's most acclaimed and important writers, Russell Banks's Continental Drift is a masterful novel of hope lost and gained, indelible story of fragile lives uprooted and transformed by injustice, disappointment, and the seductions and realities of the American dream.

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White People Vintage Contemporaries

A pen/faulkner award finalist a new york times notable book in eleven glorious stories, gay and straight, desires, author of the highly acclaimed Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, and triumphs of Americans—black and white, gives heart-breaking and hilarious voice to the fears, Allan Gurganus, old and young, Northern and especially Southern.

The title novella of White People won the National Magazine Prize. Here are war heroes bewildered by the complex negotiations of family life, former debutantes called upon to muster resources they never knew they had, vacationing senior citizens confronted by their own bravery, and married men brought up short by the marvelous possibilities of entirely different lives.

Written with flair, and deep humanity, wit, this award-winning volume confirms Allan Gurganus as one of the finest writers of our time.

Synthesis: Legal Reading, Reasoning, and Communication Aspen Casebook Series

Synthesis: legal reading, teaching students how to think like a lawyer: how to read the law, how to reason a client’s situation, Reasoning, and Communication employs a successful step-by-step approach to effective legal reasoning and writing skills, and how to write about the case in different legal forms.

Also included is complete coverage of memo and brief writing. The book is accompanied by a teacher’s Manual that contains additional exercises based on different areas of the first-year curriculum, suggestions for how to most effectively use the book, and sample syllabi. Maintaining a pedagogy designed to teach students in a variety of ways, the text incorporates numerous charts and diagrams for visual learners.

Exercises—based on tort law issues that are particularly accessible to first-year students—provide opportunities for active application of skills.

The Moral Leader: Challenges, Tools and Insights

This unique and innovative textbook is designed to encourage students and managers to confront those fundamental moral challenges, to develop skills in moral analysis and judgment, and to come to terms with their own definition of moral lea. Successful leaders � at any level and in any arena � are inevitably presented with moral and ethical choices.

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Cloudsplitter: A Novel

A triumph of the imagination and a masterpiece of modern storytelling, last surviving son of America's most famous and still controversial political terrorist and martyr, Cloudsplitter is narrated by the enigmatic Owen Brown, John Brown. But within this broader scope, suspenseful, heartbreaking narrative filled with intimate scenes of domestic life, Russell Banks has given us a riveting, of violence and action in battle, of romance and familial life and death that make the reader feel in astonishing ways what it is like to be alive in that time.

. Deeply researched, and peopled with a cast of unforgettable characters both historical and wholly invented, brilliantly plotted, Cloudsplitter is dazzling in its re-creation of the political and social landscape of our history during the years before the Civil War, when slavery was tearing the country apart.

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The Secret Sharer

Forced to determine leggatt’s fate, the captain must consider the safety of his crew and the ramifications his decision will have on his own future. The captain allows him to board and learns that the stranger, Leggatt, was first mate on another ship and he claims to have accidentally murdered a man. Torn between arresting leggatt for his crime and secretly harboring him in his own cabin, the young captain faces a choice more difficult than any he has ever known.

When his sailing ship is anchored in the Gulf of Siam—now Thailand—a first-time sea captain questions his ability to command. Anxious and eager for his crew to like him, he takes the first shift of the night watch. A young sea captain tests his mettle off the coast of Siam in this nineteenth-century psychological tale from the author of Heart of Darkness.

Alone in the dark, he encounters a mysterious man swimming alongside the vessel. . As in his classic works heart of darkness and Lord Jim, author Joseph Conrad crafts a gripping read, endowing a nautical adventure with questions of morality and self-discovery.

Lost Memory of Skin

A university sociologist of enormous size and intellect, he finds in the Kid the perfect subject for his research on homelessness and recidivism among convicted sex offenders. But when the professor’s past resurfaces and threatens to destroy his carefully constructed world, the balance in the two men’s relationship shifts.

Suddenly, the kid must reconsider everything he has come to believe, and choose what course of action to take when faced with a new kind of moral decision. Long one of our most acute and insightful novelists, Russell Banks often examines the indistinct boundaries between our intentions and actions. The acclaimed author of the sweet hereafter and rule of the bone returns with a provocative new novel that illuminates the shadowed edges of contemporary American culture with startling and unforgettable resultsSuspended in a strangely modern-day version of limbo, the young man at the center of Russell Banks’s uncompromising and morally complex new novel must create a life for himself in the wake of incarceration.

A mature and masterful work of contemporary fiction from one of our most accomplished storytellers, show-casing Banks at his most compelling, Lost Memory of Skin unfolds in language both powerful and beautifully lyrical, his reckless sense of humor and intense empathy at full bore. The perfect convergence of writer and subject, lost Memory of Skin probes the zeitgeist of a troubled society where zero tolerance has erased any hope of subtlety and compassion—a society where isolating the offender has perhaps created a new kind of victim.

Known in his new identity only as the kid, he is shackled to a GPS monitoring device and forbidden to live within 2, and on probation after doing time for a liaison with an underage girl, 500 feet of anywhere children might gather. With nowhere else to go, the Kid takes up residence under a south Florida causeway, in a makeshift encampment with other convicted sex offenders.

Barely beyond childhood himself, the Kid, despite his crime, is in many ways an innocent, trapped by impulses and foolish choices he himself struggles to comprehend.

Midnight Assassin: A Murder in America's Heartland

At trial, margaret was convicted of murder, but later was released on appeal. Newspapers across the country carried the story, and community sentiment was divided over her guilt. Ultimately, neither her innocence nor her guilt was ever proved. What also emerges is the story of early feminist Susan Glaspell, who covered the Hossack case as a young reporter and later used it as the basis for her acclaimed work “ A Jury of Her Peers.

Midnight assassin expertly renders the American character and experience: our obsession with crime, how justice is achieved, and the powerful influence of the media. In 1900, margaret hossack, the wife of a prominent Iowa farmer, was arrested for bludgeoning her husband to death with an ax while their children slept upstairs.

Perhaps margaret Hossack was acting out of fear. Patricia bryan and thomas wolf examine the harsh realities of farm life at the turn of the century and look at the plight of women—legally, socially, and politically—during that period. Or perhaps the story she told was true—that an intruder broke into the house, killed her husband while she slept soundly beside him, and was still on the loose.

The community was outraged: how could a woman commit such an act of violence? Firsthand accounts describe the victim, John Hossack, as a cruel and unstable man.

Rule of the Bone: A Novel

He finally settles in an abandoned schoolbus with Rose, a child he rescues from a fast-talking pedophile. During this time, he slips into drugs and petty crime. It is an amazing journey of self-discovery through a world of magic, violence, betrayal and redemption. When we first meet him, chappie is a punked-out teenager living with his mother and abusive stepfather in an upstate New York trailer park.

Rejected by his parents, he claims for himself a new identity as a permanent outsider; he gets a crossed-bones tattoo on his arm, out of school and in trouble with the police, and takes the name "Bone. He finds dangerous refuge with a group of biker-thieves, and then hides in the boarded-up summer house of a professor and his wife.

There bone meets i-man, an exiled rastafarian, and together they begin a second adventure that takes the reader from Middle America to the ganja-growing mountains of Jamaica.