Karen Russell is a literary wunderkind. She is a novelist and short story writer. Her debut novel, Swamplandia!, was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. She was also the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant” in 2013. In 2009 the National Book Foundation named her a 5 under 35 honoree. Her latest book, Orange World and Other Stories, released this week.
Karen Russell is an imaginative author whose stories are full wonder, surrealism and above all heart. She makes the weirdness, sadness, and joy of life feel universal. Russel penned a great advice/opinion piece in The New York Times Magazine about superstitions, how she embraces them and has been since childhood. The essay, like all of her work, is charming and funny but also beautiful and hopeful
Last night we attended a signing at Harvard Bookstore for Karen Russell. It was a packed house! Karen was charming and delightful as she recounted how her pregnancy inspired her to write the title story of her latest collection and how her writing comes from real life instances that she then transforms into the fantastic tales she weaves in her wholly original work.
Read some of the glowing recommendations Russell received from other literary superstars for Orange World.
“Ingenious…darkly funny and exquisitely composed…Russell writes with mischievous clarity, wit, and conviction, grounding the most bizarre situations in the ordinary…Heir to Shirley Jackson and a compatriot of T. C. Boyle, virtuoso Russell, gifted with acute insights, compassion, and a daring, free-diving imagination, explores the bewitching and bewildering dynamic between ‘the voracious appetite of nature and its yawning indifference’ and humankind’s relentless profligacy and obliviousness.” – Booklist, starred review
“Russell’s third collection beckons like a will-o’-the-wisp across the bog…A momentous feat of storytelling in an already illustrious career.” – Kirkus, starred review
“The inimitable Russell returns with a story collection that delights in the uncanny, parlaying the deeply fantastical to reflect the basest and most human of our desires… Each story is impeccably constructed and stunningly imagined…a wonderfully off-kilter collection.” – Publishers Weekly
“Orange World is [Russell’s] best collection yet. Her imagination’s baroque syntax has been planed down to the absolute essentials, allowing the power of her vision to speak for itself… The sense of our broken estate with nature and the past saturate this book like dread. But as always with Russell’s work these concerns make themselves felt through a hilarity that borders on pleading, and through the bounce and perfection of every line.” – John Freeman, Lit Hub
