
American Spirits
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Narrated by:
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Danny Campbell
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By:
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Russell Banks
About this listen
From one of America’s most celebrated storytellers come three dark, interlocking tales about the residents of a rural New York town, and the shocking headlines that become their local mythologies.
A husband sells property to a mysterious, temperamental stranger, and is hounded on social media when he publicly questions the man’s character. A couple grows concerned when an enigmatic family moves next door, and the children start sneaking over to beg for help. Two dangerous criminals kidnap an elderly couple and begin blackmailing their grandson, demanding that he pay back what he owes.
Suspenseful, thrilling, and expertly crafted, American Spirits explores the hostile undercurrents of our communities and American politics at large, as well as the ways local tragedies can be both devastating and, somehow, everyday. Ushering the listener through the town of Sam Dent, Russell Banks has etched yet another brilliant entry into the bedrock of American fiction.
©2024 Russell Banks (P)2024 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
“Banks is a master of mastery . . . If the residents of Sam Dent were merely stereotypes of a political movement, then American Spirits wouldn’t have the impressive heft that it does. Instead, they are, to a person, indelible characters, with lives full of meticulously observed details . . . [The stories in American Spirits] accomplish so much, so purposively with the brute mechanisms of plot and suspense. Once you read them, you won’t stop thinking of their unnerving violence and elegiac endings.” — Casey Cep, The New Yorker
“What a beautiful farewell gift the great Russell Banks has left us in American Spirits. Better than anything I’ve read, this book gave me hope about our current political situation—it gave me a way to think of it that isn’t all despair. These three utterly compelling stories are so truthful about America as to be almost unbearable. They’re funny, frank, full of love and each of them delivers an epic punch, in its own flavor—they feel Shakespearean in their daring—in how fearlessly they exploit the dramatic space they’ve mapped out. (Several times while reading I found myself thinking: ‘My God, he’s going there.’) “American Spirits has a beautiful, elegiac sense; we feel the passing of time and the fading away of things, possibly even of the American experiment. But they’re also about rebirth; what looks like decline is only decline when seen through the limited lens of one human life. Banks’ view, in this, his last book, is vast, deeply in touch with the long arc of history. He accomplishes all of this in the classic way, by looking with interest and affection and acceptance at individuals, whom the writer has summoned out of the air and come to love. “I learned so much about storytelling and about our country reading these stories, and I finished the book full of gratitude that such a man, and a writer, as Russell Banks could have existed. We’ll miss him and, I expect, won’t see his like again.” —George Saunders, author of Liberation Day
“Violence woven with politics and human foible was [Banks’s] hallmark . . . Banks artfully captures the precariousness of existence before existence turns tragic, the way feelings of masculinity get tangled up in that precarity, and how macho posturing only makes it worse . . . In Banks’s parcel of America, residents try to escape the past, but the past always has a way of getting back at us.” —Mark Athitakis, Los Angeles Times
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By: Russell Banks
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Continental Drift
- By: Russell Banks
- Narrated by: Zach Villa
- Length: 13 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Now available for the first time in audiobook format, a powerful literary classic from one of contemporary fiction's most acclaimed and important writers. Russell Banks' Continental Drift is a masterful novel of hope lost and gained and a gripping, indelible story of fragile lives uprooted and transformed by injustice, disappointment, and the seductions and realities of the American dream.
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Give up and die
- By AI on 12-09-21
By: Russell Banks
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Dead in Long Beach, California
- A Novel
- By: Venita Blackburn
- Narrated by: Lynnette Freeman
- Length: 6 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Coral is the first person to discover her brother Jay’s dead body in the wake of his suicide. There’s no note, only a drably furnished bachelor pad in Long Beach, California, and a cell phone with a handful of numbers in it. Coral pockets the phone. And then she starts responding to texts as her dead brother. Over the course of one week, Coral, the successful yet lonely author of a hit dystopian novel, Wildfire, becomes increasingly untethered from reality. Blindsided by grief and operating with reckless determination, she doubles—and triples—down on posing as her brother.
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Great Literary Work
- By Dr Ag on 02-25-24
By: Venita Blackburn
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Foregone
- A Novel
- By: Russell Banks
- Narrated by: Stephen Mendel
- Length: 11 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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At the center of Foregone is famed Canadian American leftist documentary filmmaker Leonard Fife, one of 60,000 draft evaders and deserters who fled to Canada to avoid serving in Vietnam. Fife, now in his late 70s, is dying of cancer in Montreal and has agreed to a final interview in which he is determined to bare all his secrets at last, to demythologize his mythologized life.
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Wonderful
- By ELIZABETTA on 03-20-21
By: Russell Banks
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Cloudsplitter
- A Novel
- By: Russell Banks
- Narrated by: Pete Larkin
- Length: 29 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Deeply researched, brilliantly plotted, and peopled with a cast of unforgettable characters both historical and wholly invented, 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. But within this broader scope, Russell Banks has given us a riveting, suspenseful, heartbreaking narrative filled with intimate scenes of domestic life, of violence and action in battle, of romance and familial life and death that make the listener feel in astonishing ways what it is like to be alive in that time.
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Captivating read
- By James P. Barraza on 08-02-17
By: Russell Banks
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The Sweet Hereafter
- By: Russell Banks
- Narrated by: Dawn Harvey, Chris Andrew Ciulla, Dominic Hoffman, and others
- Length: 8 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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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?
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Read the book, see the movie
- By RueRue on 11-24-20
By: Russell Banks
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Trailerpark
- By: Russell Banks
- Narrated by: Kevin Kenerly
- Length: 8 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Get to know the colorful cast of characters at the Granite State Trailerpark, where Flora in number 11 keeps more than a hundred guinea pigs and screams at people to stay away from her babies, Claudel in number 5 thinks he is lucky until his wife burns down their trailer and runs off with Howie Leeke, and Noni in number 7 has telephone conversations with Jesus and tells the police about them. Russell Banks offers gripping, realistic portrayals of individual Americans and paints a portrait of New England life that is at once dark, witty, and revealing.
By: Russell Banks
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Continental Drift
- By: Russell Banks
- Narrated by: Zach Villa
- Length: 13 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Now available for the first time in audiobook format, a powerful literary classic from one of contemporary fiction's most acclaimed and important writers. Russell Banks' Continental Drift is a masterful novel of hope lost and gained and a gripping, indelible story of fragile lives uprooted and transformed by injustice, disappointment, and the seductions and realities of the American dream.
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Give up and die
- By AI on 12-09-21
By: Russell Banks
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Dead in Long Beach, California
- A Novel
- By: Venita Blackburn
- Narrated by: Lynnette Freeman
- Length: 6 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Coral is the first person to discover her brother Jay’s dead body in the wake of his suicide. There’s no note, only a drably furnished bachelor pad in Long Beach, California, and a cell phone with a handful of numbers in it. Coral pockets the phone. And then she starts responding to texts as her dead brother. Over the course of one week, Coral, the successful yet lonely author of a hit dystopian novel, Wildfire, becomes increasingly untethered from reality. Blindsided by grief and operating with reckless determination, she doubles—and triples—down on posing as her brother.
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Great Literary Work
- By Dr Ag on 02-25-24
By: Venita Blackburn
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Plastic
- A Novel
- By: Scott Guild
- Narrated by: Jorjeana Marie, Will Damron
- Length: 10 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Erin is a plastic girl living in a plastic world. Every day she eats a breakfast of boiled chicken, then conveys her articulated body to Tablet Town, where she sells other figurines Smartbodies: wearable tech that allows full, physical immersion in a virtual world, a refuge from real life’s brutal wars, oppressive governmental monitoring, and omnipresent eco-terrorist insurgency. If you cut her, she will not bleed—but she and her fellow figurines can still be cracked or blown apart by gunfire or bombs, or crumble away from nuclear fallout.
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Unique
- By Anonymous User on 06-19-24
By: Scott Guild
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The Magic Kingdom
- A Novel
- By: Russell Banks
- Narrated by: Danny Campbell, MacLeod Andrews
- Length: 14 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1971, a property speculator named Harley Mann begins recording his life story onto a reel-to-reel machine. Reflecting on his childhood in the early 20th century, Harley recounts that after his father’s sudden death, his family migrated down to Florida’s swamplands—mere miles away from what would become Disney World—to join a community of Shakers.
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Dry account of a shaker love story
- By Sylvia Pinegar on 01-02-23
By: Russell Banks
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The Adversary
- A Novel
- By: Michael Crummey
- Narrated by: Mary Lewis
- Length: 11 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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In an isolated outport on Newfoundland's northern coastline, Abe Strapp is about to marry the daughter of a rival merchant to cement his hold on the shore when the Widow Caines arrives to throw the wedding and Abe's plans into chaos. That ruthless act of sabotage is the opening salvo in a battle between the man and woman who own Mockbeggar's largest mercantile firms, each fighting for the scarce resources of the north Atlantic fishery, each seeking a measure of revenge on the person they despise most in the world.
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Meandering
- By C GAUDIO on 12-09-24
By: Michael Crummey
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Affliction
- By: Russell Banks
- Narrated by: Richard Ferrone
- Length: 15 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Wade Whitehouse is an improbable protagonist for a tragedy. 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. 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. 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.
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The Enigma of Human Life
- By Carlo Pate on 12-07-20
By: Russell Banks
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Carrie Carolyn Coco
- My Friend, Her Murder, and an Obsession with the Unthinkable
- By: Sarah Gerard
- Narrated by: Sarah Gerard
- Length: 10 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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On the night of September 28, 2016, twenty-five-year-old Carolyn Bush was brutally stabbed to death in her New York City apartment by her roommate Render Stetson-Shanahan, leaving friends and family of both reeling. In life, Carolyn was a gregarious, smart-mouthed aspiring poet, who had seemingly gotten along well with Render, a reserved art handler. Where had it gone so terribly wrong?
By: Sarah Gerard
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Everything We Never Had
- By: Randy Ribay
- Narrated by: JB Tadena, Ramón de Ocampo, Manny Jacinto, and others
- Length: 6 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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From the author of the National Book Award finalist Patron Saints of Nothing comes an emotionally charged, moving novel about four generations of Filipino American boys grappling with identity, masculinity, and their fraught father-son relationships.
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Stirring literary YA for the post-pandemic world
- By Amazon Customer on 09-05-24
By: Randy Ribay
What listeners say about American Spirits
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- ELIZABETTA
- 04-29-24
Brilliant writing by a masterful storyteller
So many great things to say about this book, great writing, compelling story, captures and elucidates the look, feel and fortunes of a region, people and ultimately creates a portrait of humanity and its time on the planet. So sorry won’t be able to hear and learn more from Russell Banks but what he did write is iconic and continues to resonate.
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