Of the many writers working in the great tradition today, one of the best is Russell Banks.

Always, Banks writes with trembling knowledge, conviction, and authenticity.

A superb prose-stylist

Banks is too nuanced a writer to make his central character simply a study in victimhood, and the Kid isn't one for self-pity, which would smack of weakness. Yet there is more than a touch of "j'accuse" about the book. It points its finger at a society that has mistaken the easy gratification of the virtual world with reality, skin flicks for actual skin ... The novel sings brightest when it gives itself up to his guileless stream of consciousness, and is at its most persuasive and tender as it charts his growing self-awareness

Banks is one of the United States' bravest, most daring writers ... As well as being courageous, Banks is moralistic, an old style polemicist unafraid of portraying technology as a serpent in the garden ... The strength opf the book, as of Banks the writer, is an enduring belief in the grey area. Very little about this novel is black and white ... Banks can be angry and is often righteous, and there are elements of both in this novel. But his humanity shines through ... Yet again Russell Banks, as committed a commentator as Don DeLillo, looks to - and at - his country in a novel that is uncompromising on the subject of compromise. This is a tough book, raising uncomfortable issues. Banks is dogged and determined, a visionary realist who believes in testing fiction - and his readers. Here is an unsettling narrative that will leave one queasy and sheepish on the question of right and wrong and good and evil. It also testifies to the validity of story as both entertainment and polemic. There may, perhaps, be better novels, but few are as important or as cautionary

Russell Banks is the master of moral ambiguity

A canonical book for our time

Banks is one of those precious writers like Twain or Salinger who creates a voice so wonderfully real that the experience of reading them is like a conversation with an old friend

Russell Banks is a writer of extraordinary power.

Russell Banks knows everything worth knowing...and much, much more.

I trust his portrait of America more than any other-the burden of it, the need for it, the hell of it.

We live in perilous, creepy times. We toy recklessly with brand-new capacities for ruination. We bring the most human impulses to the least human means of expressing them, and we may not see the damage we do until it becomes irrevocable. Mr. Banks, whose great works resonate with such heart and soul, brings his full narrative powers to bear on illuminating this still largely unexplored new terrain

If you've never read Russell Banks it's time you acquired the habit

Banks is one of the United States' bravest, most daring writers

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

Wrenching, panoramic ... suspenseful

The uncompromising moral voice of our time