In the course of nearly 40 years of steady industry, during which he has turned out 13 books of fiction, Russell Banks has allowed his imagination to range freely across time and geography. He has observed the hard realities of life in the contemporary Caribbean in ''The Book of Jamaica'' and ''Continental Drift,'' concocted a creepy, parallel-universe 17th century in ''The Relation of My Imprisonment'' and sung the battle hymn of Harpers Ferry and Bleeding Kansas in ''Cloudsplitter,'' his swollen saga of the life of John Brown. But with the same kind of homing-pigeon intuition that keeps Philip Roth returning to North Jersey in the 1940's and 50's, Banks always circles back to his own native ecosystem -- the bare, wintry towns of central New England and upstate New York in the raw confusion of the present and the recent past.

In ''The Angel on the Roof,'' a collection of 31 stories, 22 gleaned from four earlier collections of short fiction along with nine that are appearing between hard covers for the first time, Banks pauses to examine the guilty conscience of an American businessman in Africa, the inner life of Edgar Allan Poe and the final musings of Simon Bolivar. But these moments seem anomalous. They detract from the cumulative force of the collection, which comes from its relentless anatomy of contemporary life in the northeastern United States.