Russell Banks - The Angel on the Roof

Twenty-two of the thirty-one stories selected for this volume were published in four earlier collections and have been revised for this edition. Nine are recent and uncollected. Among the early stories, I chose to include only those that did not on rereading make me cringe with embarrassment (several were written, after all, when I was in college) and that did not seem to require more than light revision. Most of the stories that I left out — and there were many more excluded than included — were failed experiments which were necessary for me to have attempted, for I would not have learned my craft if I had not written them; and while I now wish that I had not submitted them for publication, I nonetheless must admit that, if I had not published them, first in magazines and later in books, I doubt that I’d be able today to recognize them as failures. If I had tossed them out while they were still in manuscript form, strangled my darlings in their beds, as it were, I would not have learned from them as much as I have: in cold print, those stories taught me what I have no talent for or no abiding interest in.

From the beginning, my desire to write stories has been aided and abetted by editors who themselves love the form, and I would like to thank them here for that. Foremost among them is Ted Solotaroff, who published my stories early and often in American Review and New American Review and later edited the collections Trailerpark and Success Stories for HarperCollins. Then there is Daniel Halpern at Antaeus , Andy Ward and Rust Hills at Esquire, Mark Mirsky at Fiction, Joe David Bellamy at Fiction International, Rick Barthelme at Mississippi Review, William Phillips at Partisan Review , and the late James Boatwright at Shenandoah . I’m also grateful to Robert Jones, my present editor at HarperCollins, who escorted this volume into print with all his usual intelligence, tact, and energy. And finally, I especially want to thank my agent, Ellen Levine, who has been my faithful sidekick right from the start.

For those who care about such matters, I have listed here the previously collected stories under the titles of the collections in which they originally appeared.

From Searching for Survivors (1975):

“Searching for Survivors”

“With Ché in New Hampshire”

“Theory of Flight” (originally “With Ché at Kitty Hawk”)

“The Neighbor”

“The Lie”

“Defenseman”

From The New World (1978):

“The Rise of the Middle Class”

“Indisposed”

“The Caul”

From Trailerpark (1981):

“The Guinea Pig Lady”

“Black Man and White Woman in Dark Green Rowboat”

“Dis Bwoy, Him Gwan”

“Comfort”

“The Burden”

“The Child Screams and Looks Back at You”

“The Fisherman”

From Success Stories (1986):

“Queen for a Day”

“The Fish”

“Success Story”

“Mistake”

“Sarah Cole: A Type of Love Story”

“Firewood”