The Angel on the Roof: The Stories of

I'm not much of a reader, but after someone read me one of the short stories in this book, I had to get it. It's great. The plots are fascinating, the characters believable, and many of the stories will make your jaw drop. Each story left me wanting to read the one after it! I couldn't put this book down until I finished it.

This guy is great. His writing is so spare, so tender and so beautiful it's almost too good! This does mean the book lasts longer than most as you have to keep setting it down to gasp in wonderment, shake your head and think about what you've just read. I love Russell Banks!

Russell Banks knows how to tell a story. He can vary his technique from intimate to grand scale and can interchange voices so you're never sure whether he is writing autobiography or pure fiction. In ANGEL ON THE ROOF he gives us stories that span a long period of his output and while each of the stories stands on its own (at times even in a short 5 or 6 pages)there is enough linkage or afterthoughts that somehow tie this collection together. Yes, the stories are intensely interesting individually and do continue to show Banks' feelings about the alienation and abuse of parent-child relationships, and people in general, and yes they can be read individually as a bedside book for finding somnolence. But to stop reading these collected stories as a book would rob the reader of the tangents that make for enhancing the experince as a novel. For sheer clarity of line, pungent descriptions of the quality of air/space/cold/skies etc Banks is as good as contemporary writers get. This is a richly rewarding book on so many levels that it clearly belongs in every library...with frequent easy access!

The people and situations in Russell Banks's short stories, here collected from those written throughout his 37 years of writing, generally have two things in common: stark lives, and oblivious people. Yet somehow he manages to make us care about them, probably because they ring so true. His writing is poetic in a way that doesn't call attention to itself. He is one of our unknown masters who, like Carver, Ondaatje, Woiwode, most often tells us stories centered on reluctantly-civilized males mildly bewildered by their lives.Not an easy writer. But a very good one.