Karen Russell’s debut novel, Swamplandia!, is the newest hot literary book that HBO wants to adapt as a TV series.  The book centers on a Florida family who runs an alligator wrestling tourist attraction and was voted as one of the best books of 2011. Ava is 12 years old and due to a family tragedy becomes the main attraction at her family’s carnival show. She is also searching for her lost sister while wrestling the demons of her family’s history.

How Scott Rudin is going to turn this into a comedy is puzzling, especially with the dark subplots (ghost of a Depression-era teen). Hopefully Rudin will stay true to Russell’s beautiful eye for magical realism.

This on the heels of news of adaptations of The Corrections, A Visit from the Goon Squad and The Art of Fielding, HBO will (hopefully) add a very literary pedigree to their TV lineup.

The New Valley by Joshua Weil

Blood Kin by Ceridwen Dovey

Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing by Lydia Peelle

All the Living by C.E. Morgan

I haven’t read most of these books, but I loved Karen Russell’s book. I think she’s the most inventive writer to come around since George Saunders. I read” Haunting Olivia” in a debut fiction issue of The New Yorker and I was hooked. The story is imaginative, has elements of the fantastic and is a moving story of loss and adolescence. This is an amazing debut collection of stories and I’ve heard she’s working on a novel based on the story “Ava Wrestles the Alligator.”