Spend an evening in conversation with Russell Banks as he shares his new novel, Foregone. Banks is a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and the internationally acclaimed author of 21 fiction and nonfiction books, including the novels Continental Drift, Rule of the Bone, The Book of Jamaica, Cloudsplitter and Lost Memory of Skin. His honors include Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships; O’Henry and Best American Short Story Awards; the John Dos Passos Award; the inaugural Thornton Wilder Prize, the American Book Award; the Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; the Anisfield-Wolf Prize, and the 2011 Common Wealth Award for Literature. He has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction.
Foregone is a searing new novel about memory, abandonment and betrayal. At the center of Foregone is famed Canadian American leftist documentary filmmaker Leonard Fife, one of sixty thousand draft evaders and deserters who fled to Canada to avoid serving in Vietnam. Fife, now in his late seventies, 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. Imaginatively structured around Fife’s secret memories and alternating between the experiences of the characters who are filming his confession, the novel challenges our assumptions and understanding about a significant lost chapter in American history and the nature of memory itself.
Buy Foregone from Steamboat Springs' independent bookstore, Off the Beaten Path.
Join the virtual talk at 7 p.m. on Thursday, April 1 on Crowdcast. Sign up so you can sign in.