Writer Rick Moody joins V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell to celebrate the life and legacy of the late novelist Russell Banks, who died earlier this month. Moody and Terrell, who were previously Banks’s students and became his friends, reflect on his deep working-class roots, his cultivation of his own voice even in his more experimental writing, and his commitment to writing about race in the United States. Moody reads and discusses a passage from Banks’s 1985 novel Continental Drift.

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This podcast is produced by Anne Kniggendorf.

Selected Readings:

Rick Moody

Russell Banks

Hamilton Stark
The Relation of My Imprisonment
The Sweet Hereafter
Continental Drift
Affliction
The Darling
“Who Will Tell the People? On waiting, still, for the great Creole-American novel,” by Russell Banks, from Harper’s Magazine, June 2000

Others:

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S6 Ep. 16: In Memory of Russell Banks: Rick Moody on an Iconic Writer’s Life, Work and Legacy