Permanent Member of the Family, A - Tapa blanda

"[O]ne of the best books I've read in years"--Real Simple magazine

"Old-fashioned short fiction: honest, probing and moving."--Kirkus Reviews

"While these exquisitely crafted stories are highly personal, they are also permeated by a sense of sadness about the death of the American dream, as the country struggles, out of work and seemingly out of hope."--Publishers Weekly

A resounding collection by an essential American writer.--Booklist

"These characters are all broken in wonderfully literary ways ('When a terrible thing happens, and it's your own damn fault, there's no closure, he thought. Whatever happened, you live with it.') but Banks is primarily concerned with telling a good story, and the pages fly by."--Daily Beast

"It's a gift to experience such expertly evoked pathos, to see how Banks meticulously picks out and exposes the strands of his characters' muddled and suppressed feelings."--Boston Globe

"Mr. Banks uses his sturdy gifts as a writer -- his plain-spoken language, his sympathy for the downtrodden and depressed, his eye for detail (those unstrapped shoes, flipped off Ellen's feet) -- to give us visceral portraits of people trying to make sense of the past and the present."--New York Times

"[T]he writing rings with the weight of decisions made in constrained circumstances, decisions that become more moving because of how common they are... There's a reflective quality, a sense of choices made, of consequence, in which redemption and resignation may be two sides of the same coin."--Los Angeles Times

"His prose is strong and meaty - high in content, low in pretension - and he's a dab hand at credible dialogue."--Financial Times

"Banks uses simple language to reveal complex despair in characters you'll recognize from the coffee shop nearest you."--People

A literary icon known for his searing portrayals of contemporary American life presents a collection of 12 short works, including 6 of which have never been published, that visit morally complex themes in a fractured nation of inhabitants searching for connection and understanding. 30,000 first printing.