Lifestyle

The working class gets stubbed out in Russell Banks' posthumous 'American Spirits'

Published

2 years ago

March 10, 2024

The working class gets stubbed out in Russell Banks' posthumous 'American Spirits'

The stories in Russell Banks’ new short-story collection, American Spirits, feel like the most erudite guy at the bar telling you a story he’d heard from a different guy at the bar the other night. Which makes sense considering Banks, who died in 2023, based these stories off gossip he heard living part-time in Keene, New York.

“He used to go down to the local roadhouse and drink beer and watch games with the local guys,” says Banks’ widow, Chase Twichell, who is a poet. “And people would tell their secrets and their stories to him.”

In American Spirits, those secrets and stories all take place in Sam Dent, a fictional small town in upstate New York. Developers poke around the land for possibilities. People come and go during the summer for vacation. And the locals try to figure out ways to get by, but it often doesn’t end well. Many of the characters in Sam Dent are frustrated and powerless, but they find some cold comfort in politics.

Author Russell Banks delivers a keynote address during the Hemingway & Winship Awards ceremony at John F. Kennedy Library and Museum in Boston, on April 4, 2004.

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Author Russell Banks delivers a keynote address during the Hemingway & Winship Awards ceremony at John F. Kennedy Library and Museum in Boston, on April 4, 2004.

Chitose Suzuki/AP

Banks had a long career writing about people struggling with hard pasts and uneasy futures. He was twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction. Two of his novels, Affliction and The Sweet Hereafter, were turned into movies, with a third on the way. But Banks’ editor, Daniel Halpern says American Spirits is the last of Banks’ writing, and that Banks went into it wanting to write about Trump voters beyond the usual talking points.

“He never made value judgments, as long as I knew him. Which is 50 years,” Halpern says. “He had a deep well of kindness and understanding. And he was someone who you felt comfortable talking to. And I think it’s one of the reasons that allowed him to write in such depth a variety of different characters.”

Novelist Russell Banks, dead at age 82, found the mythical in marginal lives

In the opening story, “Nowhere Man,” a Sam Dent local named Doug sells some of his land to a New Jersey businessman who builds a shooting range. The two butt heads, and Doug feels increasingly frustrated and untrustworthy of everyone except for President Trump. He tries to explain this to his wife, but can’t. Banks writes:

“It was like a ball of snakes, and he couldn’t separate the many strands of oppression and humiliation and identify their individual weaknesses and kill the snakes by cutting off their heads one by one and wake up one morning brimming with self-respect, a man among men admired by women and children and other men…”

In another story, an elderly man puts on his MAGA cap right before he and his wife are kidnapped by drug dealers. And in “Homeschooling,” a young family moves next door to a lesbian couple with four adopted Black children. Everyone gets along well enough, until they don’t. “In Sam Dent, race, as a meaningful social category, trumped both lesbianism and same-sex marriage,” Banks writes.

Inspired by Sherwood Anderson’s classic short story-cycle Winesburg, Ohio, Banks doesn’t present Sam Dent as a folksy idyllic place where everyone goes along to get along. The differences are apparent and impossible to ignore. And that’s true of Keene, too. “Our little town had a big summer population that would come in,” Twichell says.

“And so it was always wealthy summer people on the one hand, and the local people who were running the service industries and so forth. And they were the caretakers, and the waitresses, and the housekeepers and the snowplow guys and so forth,” she says. “And Russell definitely identified with the local people more than the summer people. He was very uncomfortable in that role as a summer person.”

In a 2013 NPR interview, Banks remarked that he spent the last quarter century writing about the widening gap between the rich and the poor, and was finding that his work was serving a more and more relevant function. “It’s important for me to preserve certain values so that they won’t be forgotten, ” he said. “And I think that’s what poetry and fiction, drama, art does anyhow – is preserve our essential human values.”

Lifestyle

‘Hamnet’ star Jessie Buckley looks for the ‘shadowy bits’ of her characters

Published

59 minutes ago

March 2, 2026

Press Room

‘Hamnet’ star Jessie Buckley looks for the ‘shadowy bits’ of her characters

Jessie Buckley has been nominated for an Academy Award for best actress for her portrayal of William Shakespeare’s wife in Hamnet.

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Kate Green/Getty Images

Actor Jessie Buckley says she’s always been drawn to the “shadowy bits” of her characters — aspects that are disobedient, or “too much.” Perhaps that’s what led her to play Agnes, the wife of William Shakespeare, in Hamnet.

Buckley says the film, which is based on Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel, offered a chance to counter a common narrative about the playwright’s wife: that she “had kept him back from his genius,” Buckley says.

Jessie Buckley stars as Agnes in Hamnet.

But, she adds, “What Maggie O’Farrell so brilliantly did, not just with Agnes and Shakespeare’s wife, but also with Hamnet, their son, was to bring these people … and give them status beside this great man. … [And] give the full landscape of what it is to be a woman.”

The film is nominated for eight Academy Awards, including best actress for Buckley. In it, she plays a woman deeply connected to nature, who faces conflicts in her marriage, as well as the death of their son Hamnet.

Buckley found out she was pregnant a week after the film wrapped. She’s since given birth to her first child, a daughter.

Lewis Pullman and Danielle Brooks announced the 2026 Oscar nominees early Thursday morning in Beverly Hills, Calif. The 98th Academy Awards ceremony will be held on March 15.

“The thing that this story offered me, that brought me into this next chapter of my life as a mother was tenderness,” she says. “A mother’s tenderness is ferocious. To love, to birth is no joke. To be born is no joke. And the minute something’s born into the world, you’re always in the precipice of life and death. That’s our path. … I wanted to be a mother so much that that overrode the thought of being afraid of it.”

Jessie Buckley stars as Agnes and Joe Alwyn plays her brother Bartholomew in Hamnet.

Courtesy of Focus Features/Courtesy of Focus Features

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Courtesy of Focus Features/Courtesy of Focus Features

Interview highlights

On filming the scene where she howls in grief when her son dies

I didn’t know that that was going to happen or come out, it wasn’t in the script. I think really [director] Chloé [Zhao] asked all of us to dare to be as present as possible. Of course, leading up to it, you’re aware this scene is coming, but that scene doesn’t stand on its own. By the time I’d met that scene, I had developed such a deep bond with Jacobi Jupe, who plays Hamnet, and [co-stars] Paul [Mescal] and Emily Watson, and all the children and we really were a family. And Jacobi Jupe who plays Hamnet is such an incredible little actor and an incredible soul, and we really were a team. …

The Real 'Hamnet' Died Centuries Ago, But This Novel Is Timeless

The death of a child is unfathomable. I don’t know where it begins and ends. Out of utter respect, I tried to touch an imaginary truth of it in our story as best I could, but there’s no way to define that kind of grief. I’m sure it’s different for so many people. And in that moment, all I had was my imagination but also this relationship that was right in front of me with this little boy and that’s what came out of that.

On what inspired her to pursue singing growing up

I grew up around a lot of music. My mom is a harpist and a singer and my dad has always been passionate about music, so it was always something in our house and always something that was encouraged. … Early on, I have very strong memories of seeing and hearing my mom sing in church and this quite intense mercurial conversation that would happen between her, the story and the people that would listen to her. And at the end of it, something had been cracked between them and these strangers would come up with tears in their eyes. And I guess I saw the power of storytelling through my mom’s singing at a very young age, and that was definitely something that made me think I want to do that.

On her first big break performing as a teen on the BBC singing competition I’d Do Anything — and being criticized by judges about her physical appearance

I was raw. I hadn’t trained. I had a lot to learn and to grow in. I was only 17. I think there was part of their criticism which I think was destructive and unfair when it became about my awkwardness, or they would say I was masculine and send me to kind of a femininity school. … They sent me to [the musical production of] Chicago to put heels on and a leotard and learn how to walk in high heels, which was pretty humiliating, to be honest, and I’m sad about that because I think I was discovering myself as a young woman in the world and wasn’t fully formed. … I was different. I was wild, I had a lot of feeling inside me. I could hardly keep my hands beside myself and I think to kind of criticize a body of a young woman at that time and to make her feel conscious of that was lazy and, I think, boring.

On filming parts of the 2026 film The Bride! while pregnant

I really loved working when I was pregnant. I thought it was a pretty wild experience, especially because I was playing Mary Shelley and I was talking about [this] monstrosity, and here I was with two heartbeats inside me. Becoming a mom and being pregnant did something, I think, for me. My experience of it, it’s so real that it really focuses [me to be] allergic to fake or to disconnection.

Since my daughter has come and I know what that connection is and the real feeling of being in a relationship with somebody … as an actress, it’s very exciting to recognize that in yourself and really take ownership of yourself.

I’m excited to go back and work on this other side of becoming a mother in so many ways, because I’ve shed 10 layers of skin by loving more and experiencing life in such a new way with my daughter. I’m also scared to work again because it’s hard to be a mother and to work. That’s like a constant tug because I love what I do and I’m passionate and I want to continue to grow and learn and fill those spaces that are yet to be filled — and also be a mother. And I think every mother can recognize that tug.

On the possibility of bringing her daughter to travel with her as she works

I haven’t filmed for nearly a year and I cannot wait. I’m hungry to create again. And my daughter will come with me. She’s seven months, so at the moment she can travel with us and it’s a beautiful life. And she meets all these amazing people and I have a feeling that she loves life and that’s a great thing to see in a child. And I hope that’s something that I’ve imparted to her in the short time that she’s been on this earth is that life is beautiful and great and complex and alive and there’s no part of you that needs to be less in your life. You might have to work it out, but it’s worth it.

Lauren Krenzel and Susan Nyakundi produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.

Lifestyle

‘Evil Dead’ Star Bruce Campbell Reveals He Has Cancer

Published

2 hours ago

March 2, 2026

Press Room

‘Evil Dead’ Star Bruce Campbell Reveals He Has Cancer

Bruce Campbell
I’m Battling Cancer

Published
March 2, 2026
6:15 PM PST

Bruce Campbell has revealed he has cancer, but says it’s a type that’s treatable, though not curable.

“The Evil Dead” actor shared the news Monday in a message to fans, writing, “Hi folks, these days, when someone is having a health issue, it’s referred to as an ‘opportunity,’ so let’s go with that — I’m having one of those.” He continued, “It’s also called a type of cancer that’s ‘treatable’ not ‘curable.’ I apologize if that’s a shock — it was to me too.”

bruce campbell cancer announcement

Campbell said he wouldn’t go into further detail about his diagnosis, but explained his work schedule will be changing. “Appearances and cons and work in general need to take back seat to treatment,” he wrote, adding he plans to focus on getting “as well as I possibly can over the summer.”

As a result, Campbell says he has to cancel several convention appearances this summer, noting, “Treatment needs and professional obligations don’t always go hand-in-hand.”

bruce campbell evil dead everett 2

He says his plan is to tour this fall in support of his new film, “Ernie & Emma,” which he stars in and directs.

Ending on a determined note, Campbell told fans, “I am a tough old son-of-a-bitch … and I expect to be around a while.”

Lifestyle

‘Scream 7’ takes a weak stab at continuing the franchise : Pop Culture Happy Hour

Published

13 hours ago

March 2, 2026

Press Room

‘Scream 7’ takes a weak stab at continuing the franchise : Pop Culture Happy Hour

Neve Campbell in Scream 7.

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Paramount Pictures

The OG Scream Queen Neve Campbell returns. Scream 7 re-centers the franchise back on Sidney Prescott. She has a new life, a family, and lots of baggage. You know the drill: Someone dressing up as the masked slasher Ghostface comes for her, her family and friends. There’s lots of stabbing and murder and so many red herrings it’s practically a smorgasbord.

Follow Pop Culture Happy Hour on Letterboxd at letterboxd.com/nprpopculture