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You are a human animal. You are a very special breed, for you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hello and welcome to Bookworm.

I'm Michael Silverblatt, and today my guest is Russell Banks.

The occasion this time is a collected stories, the stories of Russell Banks called The Angel

on the Roof, and it's published by Harper Collins.

There are new stories in here as well as stories from four previous collections of stories.

He's the author of the novel's Cloud Splitter, Rule of the Bone, The Sweet Hereafter, Affliction,

which many listeners know from the movies that were made respectively

by Paul Schrader and Adam Ergoehan.

And now we've got a collection of 30 years of short stories.

And you mention in the introduction that following a conversation with your mother and the memory of a conversation with your father,

you've come to a conclusion about why people listen to stories and why people tell them.

They listen to them because they're hoping to hear something about themselves, and they

tell them because they want to be loved.

It's slightly reductive, but it's there, yes, of course it is.

It loved, furthermore, loved for no good reason. That's the proviso.

I want to be loved for no good reason, at least That's the proviso. I want to be loved for no good reason.

At least the narrator of that introduction perceives that and the impulse behind both, of

course the narrator is me, my mother and my father's stories, and the strategy behind both

their stories, which were quite different

...