SOURCE: A review of The New World, in The American Book Review, Vol. 2, No. 1, Summer, 1979, pp. 9–10.

In the following review, Dessner praises the variety of stories found in The New World.

Readers unfamiliar with the work of Russell Banks might do well to begin with the last and title story of his new collection, The New World. Here a preposterous epic poem is described, and an old moral fable told, and both related to the intersecting lives of their authors. What matters, our narrator tells us, is “the spark that … flew” from the lives to the literary creations: “That spark was everything. It's how one forgives oneself and others.” This helps us see that the stories Banks' characters tell, plain people as well as professional novelists, in whatever genre, whether committed to paper or not, are not simply good or poor literature nor merely rationalizations, confessions, justifications, or...