Lost Memory of Skin

✍ Scribed by Russell Banks

• Publisher: HarperCollins US;Ecco
• Year: 2011
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 331 KB
• Edition: 1st ed
• Category: Fiction

✦ Synopsis

Amazon.com Review

Amazon Best Books of the Month, October 2011: In Lost Memory of Skin, Russell Banks plays peek-a-boo with the reader lifting each corner just enough to wonder at what may lie underneath. When we meet the Kid, he is grappling with his public status as a convicted sex offender, living under a Florida causeway with other men whom society finds both despicable and impossible to remove and thus by most people simply wished out of existence. Enter the Professor, with his genius IQ and massive physical presence, eager to prove that men like the Kid have been shaped by social forces and are capable of change. The pair seem diametrically opposed yet share a profound sense of isolation, of difference and solitude, held hostage by their secrets in this morally complex and thought-provoking story of illusions and blurry truths in a novel that that hums with electricity from beginning to end. --Seira Wilson

Review

Banks may be the most compassionate fiction writer working today Lost Memory of Skin is proof that Banks remains our premier chronicler of the doomed and forgotten American Male. (New York Times Book Review )

A ompelling story... one of those rare, strange, category-defying fictions that grabs hold of you... Its hard to shake it off. And even when you do, it leaves a mark. (Chicago Tribune )

Lost Memory of Skin should be required reading for anyone interested in fixing the countrys broken criminal justice systemBanks, in his latest novel, takes an unflinching look at people at their worst and manages to turn it into art. (Associated Press )

His boldest imaginative leap yet into the invisible margins of society Lost Memory of Skin is a haunting book. (Wall Street Journal )

Banks is in top form in his seventeenth work of fiction, a cyclonic novel of arresting observations, muscular beauty, and disquieting concerns a commanding, intrepidly inquisitive, magnificently compassionate, and darkly funny novel of private and societal illusions, maladies, and truths. (Booklist (starred review) )

One of our finest novelists gives voice to the unspeakable[A] compelling story (O, the Oprah Magazine )

Among contemporary writers giving voice to Americas beleaguered working class, Russell Banks may have no peerthis oddly unsettling, beautifully crafted novelraise[s] fascinating issues. (San Francisco Chronicle )

Bankss enormous gamble in both plot and character pays off handsomelyBy the end, Kafka is rubbing elbows with Robert Ludlum, and Banks has mounted a thrilling defense of the novels place in contemporary culture. (The New Yorker )

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 )

Russell Bankss work presents without falsehood and with tough affection the uncompromising moral voice of our time... I trust his portraits of America more than any otherthe burden of it, the need for it, the hell of it. (Michael Ondaatje )

Mr. Banks knows plot, and incorporates intriguing complications to keep the novel building power all the way to the end. (Pittsburg Post-Gazette )

Destined to be a canonical novel of its time... it delivers another of Bankss wrenching, panoramic visions of American moral life, and this one very particular to the early 21st century... Banks, whose great works resonate with such heart and soul, brings his full narrative powers to bear. (Janet Maslin, New York Times )

Banks is a master of peeling back the veneer to show us for the desperate creatures we are, no more so than in his fearless Lost Memory of Skin[Banks] writes here with a combination of compassion and outrage a compelling read and an indictment of our age. (Miami Herald )

[It] is a pleasure to see [Banks] gift turned to big, semisurreal characters. The grand, rambling examination of guilt and blame takes place against a ravishingly bleak backdrop, lyrically described, while each revelation of character is like a quiet explosion. (Time Out New York )

Banks reveals the two [characters] with tenderness and trenchant wit, in a story that, not surprisingly, plumbs the depth of human despair and resilience. If that prowess is predictable, Skin is bound to leave you shaken and strangely reassured. (USA Today )

Russell Banks really does know how to pull his readers into a dark, dark world only to deliver us into the light. (Boston Globe )